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Saturday, August 20, 2022

Herman Melville and the Bible

Herman Melville and the Bible: The Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature - March 2020

Ruth Blair has a fine chapter in The Bible and Literature, ed. Calum Carmichael (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with this to say about the "spiritual exercise" required by the demanding yet "often fluid and flexible" verse form of Clarel:
"... the poem engages the reader in a difficult journey, rather like the pilgrimage itself, on horseback--a mode of travel in which one cannot afford to lose concentration, and whose rhythm the tetrameter line echoes" (page 249).

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