| Front | Clarel |
|---|---|
| Back | a poem and pilgrimage in the holy land a 7000 line poem by Herman Melville Melville's reflections on his visit to Holy Land 20 years earlier the poem is an enquiry into and search for faith its various characters represents a range of attitudes, some express religious doubts arising from their personal experience or philosophy; others are comfortably certain of their faith none, however, is able to assist Clarel, an American theology student visiting Jerusalem to resolve his own certainties Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is an epic poem by American writer Herman Melville, originally published in two volumes. It is a poetic fiction about an American young man named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Holy Land with a cluster of companions who question each other as they pass through Biblical sites. Melville uses this situation to explore his own spiritual dilemma, his inability to either accept or reject inherited Christian doctrine in the face of Darwin's challenge, and to represent the general theological crisis in the Victorian era.[1] Clarel is the longest poem in American literature, stretching to almost 18,000 lines (longer even than European classics such as the Iliad, Aeneid and Paradise Lost). As well as for its great length, Clarel is notable for being the major work of Melville's later years. Critics at the time were baffled by its style, which is terse and philosophical, rather than the lyric and poetic style in his better known prose. But Melville has gradually gained a reputation as one of America's great nineteenth-century poets, and Clarel is now acclaimed alongside his fiction as one of his great works.[2] |
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