Fragments from a Writing Desk: DOING BIOGRAPHY COVERTLY: 15 YEARS AS A TEXTUAL SC...

Fragments from a Writing Desk: DOING BIOGRAPHY COVERTLY: 15 YEARS AS A TEXTUAL SC...:   FOUND 18 February 2022--incomplete, rough, but I will put it on record 22 September-4 October 2009; 24 December 2009 11-19 March 2010; 2...

"Biographers still ought to be afraid of the New Criticism..."

Maybe so, but if my heroes Jay Leyda and Hershel Parker had better attended to New Critical ABC's they would never have misidentified J. E. A. Smith's On Onota's Graceful Shore as the "stout" poem in "heroic measure" that Melville read aloud from in a Berkshire barn--with gusto, according to Evert Duyckinck. The meter of Smith's unpretentious ballad is tetrameter whereas "heroic measure" always designates pentameter. The "stout" patriotic work described by Duyckinck in August 1851 was John C. Hoadley's ambitious national poem "Destiny." 648 lines, pentameter all the way down. In this case, indifference to elemental principles and methods of New Criticism blinded Melville's best biographers to the presence of Melville's future brother-in-law and ever-faithful friend.

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/refresher-on-heroic-measure.html

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/hoadleys-national-poem-cheered-by.html

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html