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In the critical revival of melville’s writings that began a century ago, the acknowledgment that he was an accomplished poet as well as a writer of outstanding fiction began roughly halfway through this century of revival; yet a basic recognition of the merits of the many poems left in manuscript at this death is still in the process of realization. One of the chief benefits of the publication of the long-awaited final volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville’s writings in 2017 is having the opportunity to examine all the author’s poetry that remained unpublished in his lifetime in a meticulously edited edition, following its appearance in previous collections of Melville’s verse, notably Howard Vincent’s 1947 Hendricks House edition of The Collected Poems of Herman Melville. In addition to the finely crafted meditative and lyric poetry within this collection, of particular interest is the pair of longer poems incorporating aesthetic and political themes, “At the Hostelry” and “An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba” (generally referred to as “Naples in the Time of Bomba”), both likely begun in the late 1850s but later revised to form part of the author’s ongoing “Burgundy Club” book project along with an evolving series of prose sketches. (The two long poems, with introductory sketches, are given the general title Parthenope in the new Northwestern-Newberry Edition, a name referring to the mythological Siren associated with the city of Naples.)1
Integral to the poems of Parthenope are the sketches of the personae attached to each poem, with the Marquis de Grandvin acting as speaker of “At the Hostelry,” and Major Jack Gentian retrospectively relating the events that he experienced in “Naples in the Time of Bomba.” While “At the Hostelry” consists of a spirited symposium on the meaning of the “picturesque” among a gallery of leading Renaissance and Baroque artists, framed by a celebration of Garibaldi’s role in the reunification of Italy, the twelve-canto narrative of “Naples in the Time of Bomba,” set in rhymed and unrhymed iambic tetrameters, provides the reader with a more firmly grounded and historically evocative setting in the repressive regime of the King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies while offering reflections about the paradoxical intermingling of...