What is the best biography of Herman Melville and what are the

the best work on herman melville is charles olson's "Call Me Ishmael" which may be the greatest work of literary criticism of all time

Critical Companion to Herman Melville is the one I have. Is good.

>>8918464

https://newrepublic.com/article/122388/all-if-james-wood-life-herman-melville

the above article is one of the best things I have ever read on Melville

>>8918467

Interesting. What is the major argument of the author? Is more a book that deals with characters, or symbols, or language, or meaning, etc?

>>8918502

first of all, charles olson is one of america's finest poets, so don't expect it to be an essay. it's entirely about moby dick but so much more. it deals with the history of moby dick, shakespeare's influence, and the fundamental questions and desires at the heart of the novel. it's a breathtaking work. like 100 pages too.

The best, most authoritative biography is Hershel Parker's.

>>8918525
Do you have to read Moby Dick before reading it? Would reading the Spark Notes suffice?

Any good collections of his poetry? Also all the stories he wrote for Putnams Monthly Magazine? Some of them are included in various versions of Billy Budd, Sailor and other stories, but I'm having trouble finding all of them.

>>8918502
>https://newrepublic.com/article/122388/all-if-james-wood-life-herman-melville

During the time that Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he underwent a kind of insanity of metaphor. It was Melville’s love of metaphor that drew him ever further into “Infidel-ideas.” Metaphor, quite literally, bred metaphysics for Melville. His metaphor has a life of its own; it is not only Melville that is “growing,” it is also his language. Melville is the most naturally metaphorical of writers, and one of the very greatest. He saw the inside of the whale’s mouth covered with “a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins”; the spouting jet of the whale made him look like “a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon;” and almost every page of Moby-Dick carries something like this. Melville drew on the example of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century poetry and prose as naturally as if he were of that age and not a nineteenth-century American. He saw how metaphor domesticates and localizes (the whale as burgher) even as it enlarges. For with metaphor, as Sir Thomas Browne put it in Religio Medici (1642), “there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”

Soaked in theology, Melville was alert to the Puritan habit of seeing the world allegorically, that is, metaphorically. The world was a place of signs and wonders which could always yield up its meaning like secret ink. Melville did a certain amount of this sign-gazing himself. Writing to Evert Duyckinck in August 1850, he mentioned that he was writing on an old heirloom, a desk of his uncle’s. “Upon dragging it out to day light, I found that it was covered with the marks of fowls ... eggs had been laid in it—think of that!—Is it not typical of those other eggs that authors may be said to lay in their desks ... .”

Melville had a way of following metaphor and seeing where it led him. He wrote to Duyckinck, offering Mardi for his library, in the hope that it

>may possibly—by some miracle, that is—flower like the aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower.

A year later, writing to Hawthorne, he used an image which has become celebrated:

>I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.

>>8918556

Both similes force Melville into dialectic. Having embarked on them, he must follow their life and then their death. His book is like an aloe; but some aloes never flower, and since he has mentioned the flowering of the aloe, he must also mention the aloe’s failure to flower. The second image is more striking, because Melville made this comparison at the very height of his creative fever, while writing Moby-Dick. At this pinnacle, he foresees falling into decline. And why? Because, having likened himself to one of the seeds from the Pyramids, he must follow his own metaphor, and record that these seeds “grew to greenness, and then fell to mould.”

No one is actually forced by metaphor, except a madman. Melville chooses the metaphors that then squeeze their return from him. He knows that the seeds from the Pyramids were not like other seeds, and that they “fell to mould.” But, of all writers, he understood the independent, generative life that comes from likening something to something else. Keats spoke of how language “yeasts and works itself up”—works itself. This was everything to Melville. Pondering Goethe’s advice that one must “Live in the all, and then you will be happy,” he writes: “This ‘all’ feeling ... . You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. You hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling.” What Melville is crediting here is our power to create new life, a life that exists independently from us. And this is the life of metaphor. You live “in the all” when you feel metaphorical, when you feel that your hair is not your hair but has become leaves, your legs not your legs but growing shoots. And, once they are growing, who can stop them?

>>8918573

The theological implications of Melville’s ravishment by metaphor are immense. Metaphor carries something over, it changes. In his letters and in his fiction, Melville thinks through metaphor, uses it to sway his thought. He ends one letter by saying that he began his letter in a small way, yet “here I have landed in Africa.” Metaphor transports him, and is then called upon to give image to that very transportation. In his note on Milton’s “wanderings in religious belief,” Melville wrote that “he who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind”—Melville wanders, via metaphor, out of “the same mind” into a different mind, out of sameness into likeness or difference.

His love of metaphor leads Melville marvelously astray, theologically. His “wandering” love of language breaks up his God, and he encourages this; his love of language bribes him against that rival, the Original Author. An example: in Judea, in 1857, Melville was put into a cold trance by the rockiness of the landscape. “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?” he asks in his journal. The land, he feels, must have produced the religion: “As the sight of haunted Haddon Hall suggested to Mrs Radcliffe her curdling romances, so I have little doubt, the diabolical landscapes [sic] great part of Judea must have suggested to the Jewish prophets, their terrific theology.” What is terrific is the almost casual blasphemy of the metaphor. Ann Radcliffe wrote Gothic romances. Yet it is because Melville cannot resist the impulse of likeness that he is drawn into comparing biblical theology to a Gothic romance.

>>8918583

Moby-Dick represents the triumph of this atheism of metaphor. Or, perhaps, this polytheism of metaphor. For it is a book in which allegory explodes into a thousand metaphors; a book in which the Puritan habit of reading signs and seeing stable meanings behind them is mocked by an almost grotesque abundance of metaphor. In this book, meaning is mashed up like a pudding. The Godhead is indeed broken into pieces. Truth is kaleidoscopically affronted. The whale, which poor Ahab chases, is likened to everything under the sun, and everything under the moon, too—a portly burgher, an Ottoman, a book, a language, a script, a nation, the Sphinx, the Pyramids. The whale is also Satan and God. The whale is “inscrutable.” It is so full of meanings that it threatens to have no meaning at all, which is the fear that Ishmael confesses to in the celebrated chapter called “The Whiteness of The Whale.” Critics who persist in seeing in Melville an American Gnostic do so because the whale is a demiurge, a bad god. But what, Melville asks, if the whale means nothing? What if, at the very heart of the sarcophagus, there is absolutely nothing?

By late summer, 1851, it was over. The book was done. Parker is right to call Moby-Dick “the most daring and prolonged aesthetic adventure that had ever been conducted in the hemisphere in the English language.” Melville had asked the question: How does an American writer make tragedy worthy of Shakespeare’s without setting the story in the remote past? He answered it by making his novel a historical novel whose epoch is the whale—thousands of years old. As Walter Scott filled his novels with the dust of medieval France or Scotland, with clothes, dates, battles, so Melville filled his book with the clothes, dates and battles of the whale. The whale is a country and an age.

>>8918589

How easily it might not have worked! The power is all verbal. Without the language, the metaphysics would be just grain. Although one remembers the rhapsodies of poetry, one forgets how precise, how grounded, is the language, with what vernacular swing it moves.Melville Americanizes Shakespeare, gives it tilt. Where Shakespeare has an Antony like a dolphin, showing its back above the element it lived in, Melville has a democracy of porpoises, tossing their backs to heaven “like caps in a Fourth of July crowd.” Queequeg, the cannibal, can go anywhere: “Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale.” Not for nothing does Ishmael pray to “the great democratic God.”

Again and again one is thrilled by the teeter of metaphor, watching it almost fail, and then take like a skin graft. There is a mad persistence to this metaphorizing, a fiery pedantry. There is the noise the whale makes, “an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter”; the harpooners turning their harpoons in the very quick of the beast, and yet delicately, “as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed.” There is Pip, the little Negro boy, who falls into the water “like a traveler’s trunk ... . Bobbing up and down in the sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves.” There is Ahab’s soul, “a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs.” And at last, the final chase, the whale sliding like metaphor itself through its fluid of meanings: “on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings.”

>>8918464

In this website one can see Melville's marginal annotations and marks on his books, including his seven-volume colection of Shakespeare's plays.

http://melvillesmarginalia.org/browser.php?page=8

great stuff.

>>8918542
Moby dick is a pretty good book