Hershel Parker

Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before his Gorgonian head, Melville's verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox...