Melville’s About-Face
By CYNTHIA WACHTELL
The two versions of the poem show Melville caught in the act of editing his work. More precisely, the two drafts reveal him caught in the process of editing his reaction to the Civil War. Was it dreadful or glorious? Or could it be both? With his small revisions, Melville weighed the glossy vocabulary of romanticism against the starker vocabulary of nascent realism. In the end, he compromised. But it was not necessarily a happy compromise.
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