The Allen Ginsberg Project: Expansive Poetics - 11 ( Herman Melville)

The Allen Ginsberg Project: Expansive Poetics - 11 ( Herman Melville): AG: Then, another heroic precursor, nineteenth-century, is Herman Melville , as a poet. How many here have run across Melville as...

Lecture/class interaction from 1981, transcribed at The Allen Ginsberg Project with a link to the audio.  Fine insights abound, like this about Melville's "vowelic melody":

So the thing with him (as with Moby Dick) there's that vowelic melody - "I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist" - Like the last line ending his great prose-poem, Pierre - "and her long hair fell over him and arbored him in ebon vines" -" And her long hair fell over him and arbored him in ebon vines" - that's the line of a novel, Pierre.  (The Allen Ginsberg Project)