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Poetics and Politics in the Post-Bellum Epic:

Wordsworthian Themes in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Matthew Scott
University of Oxford

In this paper, I hope to explore the relationship between one of literature’s most widely read long
poems, The Prelude, and one of its least known, Herman Melville’s Clarel.

Melville’s long poem (1876) describes the pilgrimage of a young American male searching for
revealed truth in the Holy Land. The poem ends in the failure of this mission and yet in the
acknowledgement that truth must be sought in such a retreat from the world, even as that world
becomes increasingly industrialised and modern. It presents the alienation of literary and philosophical
sensitivity from modernity, and recasts Melville’s own distressing tour of Europe and the Near East in
the early 1850s in the light of the catastrophe of the post-bellum history of the United States. While
providing a critical reflection upon Romantic Orientalism, it also presents us with a sense of the
troubled relationship between an emergent American identity and those European or Near Eastern
identities which, though historically grounded, are experiencing change through intervention. Lastly, it
is a poem which reflects considerably upon the importance of landscape and architectural topography
for the construction of identity through literary and Biblical interpretation, and is, as such, both
consciously archaic or antiquarian and conspicuously modern. These are the aspects of the poem that I
would like to explore in reference to Wordsworth.

Research for this article is part of a wider project on the relationship between American writing in the
nineteenth century and British Romantic antecedents, in which I propose a model that differs from than
examination of the history of influence through source study. Instead, I am keen to examine the ways in
which British Romantic poets enter the literary habitus as commodities, representative of broad modes
of thinking by which later authors are aided in the conception of their own works. As such, I do not
argue that Clarel is a late Romantic poem, but rather that it is a self-consciously post-bellum work,
which attempts to understand the question of American identity in the late nineteenth century by using
models that are inherited from texts that are themselves embedded in the public's reading
consciousness. Melville’s own reading of Romantic authors such as Coleridge and Shelley has been
considerably investigated in relation to his earlier work. There is considerable evidence of their
continued influence in Clarel, as well as that of Byron and Southey. His reading of Wordsworth is less
well known, although we have evidence of his knowing The Prelude and The Excursion; both of which,
as widely disseminated texts, appear to provide potential models for Melville’s project. In this article, I
wish to investigate links between Clarel and Wordsworth in terms of the construction of identity in
troubled and depressed states. I will focus both upon localised instances such as the state of mind of the
author in the recollection of war and revolution, or the condition of those displaced by war; and upon
the use and benevolent value of landscape and architecture in the construction of an unified
subjectivity.

Matthew Scott is Lecturer of English at Hertford College in the University of Oxford, where he has
taught English and American literature and completed a doctoral thesis on the concept of wonder in
Romantic aesthetics. He was previously a Kennedy Memorial Scholar and research fellow at Harvard
University and has published articles and reviews in Romanticism, The British Association for
Romantic Studies Bulletin, The Wordsworth Circle, The Charles Lamb Bulletin and Romanticism on
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the Net. His most recent project was a series of translations of eighteenth-century German and French
texts for The Faber Book of Opera, (Faber and Faber, 2000) and he is working on an edition of William
Hazlitt’s art criticism.