About this item
An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America's greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennialBest known today for his novels and stories, the author of Moby-Dick was a devoted and accomplished poet. Ranging from Civil War battlefields to the haunted byways of the Holy Land, from close observation of nature to deep philosophical mediation, Melville's poetry was central to his life and art and he justly ranks with Whitman and Dickinson as one of America's three greatest 19th-century poets. Complete here for the first time in the fourth and final installment in the Library of America's Herman Melville edition, are all four books of poetry he published in his lifetime plus uncollected poems and the poems from two projected volumes left unfinished at the time of his death, allowing readers to appreciate for themselves the extraordinary range of his poetic achievement.
About the Author
The writing career of Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) peaked early, with his early novels, such as Typee becoming best sellers. By the mid-1850s his poularity declined sharply, and by the time he died he had been largely forgotten. Yet in time his novel Moby Dick came to be regarded as one of the finest works of American, and indeed world, literature, as was Billy Budd, which was not published until long after his death, in 1924.
