Conflict, Coherence And Completeness In Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces And Aspects Of The War

This thesis is to explore how Herman Melville (1819-1891), as a poet, strives to achieve his original style in the creation of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, which is not only a poetic record but an envisioned experience of the American Civil War. The studies on this work have long focused on the conflicting elements, for example, the authoritative criticism made by Robert Penn Warren places emphasis on various conflicting factors such as subject matter and rhetoric. Conflict seems to be the benchmark of war poems. Can a poet of war find a way out of the conflict? Through tracing Melville's endeavor to overcome the conflicting point of view, the present research aims at revealing the underlying coherence of the poet's way of thinking and his way of expressing in the light of literary, historical, and biographical studies. Melville manages to observe and understand the American Civil War objectively, although he has to take the standpoint of a white northerner. This character makes his poems different from his contemporaries. In concordance with this character, Melville attempts to achieve completeness in artistic creation. The outcome of his efforts is a work of deep thinking and unique style.This research is open to methods, approaches, or theories of literary study, if they prove to be useful. But the focus is on the texts themselves. The conclusion is based on the close readings and analyses of the texts that include the biographic materials such as letters, journals and logs. The basic principle is to seek the truth from facts, but not to follow any fixed formula.The introduction is a review of the reception of and study on Battle-Pieces. As soon as it was published for the first time in 1866, this collection was neglected by critics and readers. In the revival of Melville in the 1920s, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, together with other works of Melville, was reprinted. But Melville was not taken as a poet and studied seriously until the 1940s. This decade saw three editions of selected and collected poems of Melville. And Robert Penn Warren published his paper"Melville the Poet". Since then, Melville's poetry attracts many poets and critics, for example, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, Walter E. Bezanson, and Richard Harter Fogle, to name but a few. And the poems in Battle-Pieces are frequently selected, reprinted, and anthologized. The study of Melville's poetry flourished at the beginning of the new century. In the autumn of 2007, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies published a special issue for discussing Melville's poetry and put forward the question of Melville's new revival as a poet.The first chapter is a biographic and historic study, aiming to reassess the relation between the American Civil War and Melville's career as a poet. In the antebellum days Melville prepared a book of poems but failed to get it published. The outbreak of the war afforded him a chance to take up the pen to write poems about a subject matter fit to his ideal of poetry. The nature and impact of the war are illustrated in this chapter.The second chapter can be taken as a thematic analysis, although the aim is to account for the relation between the poet's thinking and the production of the war poems. It is illustrated that Melville's way of thinking and observing the war influences his writing, especially the choice of subject matters and the way of organizing them. On the basis of the achievements of the forerunners such as Warren and Milder, this research clarifies the various conflicts in this collection into three pairs of polarities and reveals the coherence underlying them. The three threads are as following: the truth beneath the good and the evil, the reconciliation between the North and the South, and the irreversible transition from the old to the modern. Therefore, the collection as a whole is unified under Melville's principle of"unlikely things meet and mate to create pulsed life."It is worth pointing out that the distinction of the three polarity pairs is not a cut and dried formula, and these pairs interweave and overlap each other.The third chapter is to analyze the relation between Melville's aesthetic credos and the style of the Battle-Pieces. Melville's ideal of poetry can be generalized as the pursuit of the ultimate and completeness. This is based on the cross reference from Melville's works and the studies on his marginalia. His treatment of the formal aspects of the poetry, such as diction, rhyme, rhythm, and syntax, aims to achieve the effect that he wants. The images and symbols serve to realize his ideal of poetry. The stone images are illustrated in detail to account for Melville's artistic character.The fourth chapter is to take a poem as a fuller example for appreciating Melville's art, for remedying the discontinuity of the analyses of poems confined by the special topics in the former chapters. It is also expected that this study will shed some new light on rethinking human nature, especially with respect to the wars fought by various groups of people throughout the entire history of human beings.