Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (week 1)

Details

By 1866, Herman Melville's writing career was commercially unviable. Seeking financial security, he obtained a job as a customs inspector, but his impulse as an author never waned. The epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)--nicknamed "the customs house poem" because it was written during this period--was Melville's passion project and the last full-length book he ever published. He self-consciously described it as "a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity." Meanwhile, Melville's wife, resenting how the massive undertaking had maddened him, called it a "dreadful incubus of a book." The end result is a contender for the longest poem in American literature: four parts, 150 cantos, and stretching to almost 18,000 lines.

Clarel tells the story of the title character, an American divinity student, struggling with his faith on a pilgrimage through the Holy Land. He and his international group of companions follow a Biblical itinerary, probing theological questions and navigating their own spiritual crises. Drawing heavily on Melville's trip to the Levant in 1856, Clarel, perhaps more than any other work, encapsulates a lifetime of the author's soul searching and intellectual anguish.

Early critics were repelled by its rigid (perhaps arid) poetic form--unlike the watery, flowing style of Melville's nautical prose--and readers who attempted it were (like its characters) in for a treacherously long journey. But to say so is to discern Melville's union of form and function, and Clarel has gradually become recognized as a masterpiece. Edward Dorn declared that "the great unread Clarel will prove, in this century, to be The Great American Poem." Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land and "a complex document in literary history and in the history of ideas; and it is, too, the document of a conscience and a consciousness."

In the words of Hilton Obenziner, Clarel is filled with "numerous passages of incredible brilliance... constant eruption of ideas and mythic narratives." It engages with "arguments and counterarguments on religion, politics, and science, on 'just about everything Melville found theologically and ideologically troubling in his century.'" It "pulls the reader toward what at first may seem only a puzzling literary pursuit into an obsessive, psycho-religious quest" and "reaches back to other inventions of the nether regions, notably to the descents of Virgil and Dante... written from the position of the dead."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Schedule:

Book 1: