Herman Melville’s Pessimist Verse: James Thomson and Timoleon, Etc.

Abstract In a letter in 1885, Melville commented about a pessimist poet: “altho’ neither pessimist nor optomist [sic] myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days.” Melville often valorized varieties of dark and pessimistic philosophy, and in his later work he engaged pessimist poets like James Thomson and Giacomo Leopardi, and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Yet Melville’s work, unlike Thomson’s and Leopardi’s, is not unequivocally pessimist. Instead, it relishes pessimism, appreciating it as a mood, a hue that Melville deployed and experimented with at various points in both his fiction and poetry. This chapter considers recent appraisals of philosophical pessimism to reassess Melville’s engagement with pessimism and to draw from it unlikely solutions for how we maneuver between ongoing existential crises and discrete occasions of ethical and political challenge.