Melville Renders the Real

During the eighties and through his death in 1891—that is, the height of high realism and the Realism War—Melville actively wrote, revised, and published his last two volumes, composed Billy Budd, and wrote and revised an extensive body of unpublished poems. Yet scholarship has rarely situated Melville the poet in the debates about realism and idealism common in the print culture of the age. This chapter demonstrates that he carved out a realist poetics. This poetics simultaneously countered both Howellsian models of realism and the genteel poetics of romantic idealism. Melville predicates his realist poetic practice on a vision of “the Real”—his term in “The Aeolian Harp” (1888)—as epistemologically opaque.