Besides novels Cooper wrote social criticism. In the latter he analysed the shortcomings of democracy in his own country.

Melville dedicated Moby-Dick; or Whale to Hawthorne in recognition of his help and influence in re-writing the imperfect first draft. The book, when first published, damaged Melville’s reputation as a writer. His readers began to desert him, calling him either eccentric or mad. The public was ready to accept unusual and exciting adventures, but they did not want ironic, frightening exposures of the terrible ambiguities of life. In writing Moby Dick Melville meant “to give the truth of the thing”, dark Shakespearian truths that “in this world of lies” can be told only “covertly, and by snatches”. The recurrent themes of his letters to Hawthorne – democracy and aristocracy, the ironic failure of Christians to be Christian, fame and immortality, the brotherhood of great-souled mortals, and the Miltonic themes of “Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate – were all recurrent themes of Moby-Dick. Largely ignored by critics of the time, Moby Dick was rediscovered in the 1920s, and today takes its place as one of the most remarkable novels in the history of American - indeed, world literature.

Moby-Dick is the name of an old white whale, half fish and half devil that has a conflict with Captain Ahab, who not only loses a leg in the affray, but receives a twist in the brain and becomes a victim of monomania. Captain Ahab, “ungodly, god-like man, comes to believe himself predestined to take a bloody revenge on his enemy. He pursues him with fierce energy and at last perishes in a dreadful fight, just as he thinks that he has reached the goal of his frantic passion. The ship is broken in fragments. The crew perish. One person only escapes to tell the story. This is the narrator, Ishmael, whose name in common use began to mean an exile or outcast. Moby- Dick disappears unscathed; and for all we know, is the same “delicate monster”, whose power is destroying another ship, as has just been announced from Panama.

On this framework Melville constructed a romance, a tragedy, and a natural history with suggestions on psychology, ethics, and theology. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic meanings. In chapter XV, ”The Right Whale’s Head”, the narrator says that the right whale is a Stoic and the Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two classical schools of philosophy.

The tale is divided into 135 chapters, prefatory materials and “Epilogue”. The chapters are organized in several ways:

- chapter sequences of narrative progression – the chapters relating the chase of the whale: “First Day”, “Second Day”, “Third Day”;

- chapter sequences of a theme – the three chapters on whale painting;

- sequences of structural similarity – the five chapters beginning with “The Quarter-Deck” all use dramatic techniques;

- the chapter clusters – several chapters are linked by themes or root images, other chapters intervening;

- balancing chapters, either of opposites (“Loomings” and “The Epilogue”) or of similars (“The Quarter-Deck” and “The Candles”).

This highly complex and technically profound novel is rich in symbolism and allegory, and contains an essentially despairing vision of man’s place amongst “the darkness and decay and inscrutable malevolence of the universe”. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In the novel Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby Dick is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby Dick; on the contrary, the facts themselves tend to become symbols, and every fact is obscurely related in a cosmic web to every other fact. This idea of correspondence (as Melville calls it in the chapter ”Sphinx”) does not, however, mean that humans can “read” truth in nature, as it does in Emerson. Behind Melville’s accumulation of facts is a mystic vision - but whether this vision is evil or good, is never explained. Melville’s pessimism was rooted in his conviction that man was in permanent conflict with dark forces bent on frustrating or denying his individual will. The struggle between Captain Ahab and the white sperm whale, Moby- Dick,thus possesses an ulterior level of significance which goes beyond the compelling realism of the whale hunt. Beneath the whole story is allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Moby Dick, representing the unknowable and dangerous, for Melville symbolizes nature. For Captain Ahab, however, he represents all the world’s evil. The men who went to sea are viewed also under the aspect of universe and eternity. Figures, details, and the atmosphere are all symbolic. The odd crew of the “Pequod”, made of different races, symbolizes the humanity itself. For most of his life Melville had quarrelled with God. The seeds of this quarrel with religion and civilization may be found already in hisTypee and Omoo in which the happiness of the heathens is contrasted with the corruption of the Christian sailors. Through Captain Ahab Melville tried to get to the heart of life and to answer the question: was there a benign God, or was there merely a blind and inscrutable force reigning the world?

The novel is modern in its tendency to be reflective. In other words, the novel is about itself. Melville often comments on mental processes such as writing, reading, and understanding. A chapter, for instance, is an exhaustive survey in which the narrator attempts a classification but finally gives up, saying that nothing great can ever be finished. Ahab insists on bringing his mission to an end, but the novel shows that just as there are no finished texts, there are no final answers except perhaps death.

Certain literary references resonate throughout the novel. Ahab, named for an Old Testament king, desires a total, god-like knowledge. Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, who pays tragically for wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind before he is wounded in the leg and finally killed. Moby-Dick ends with the word “orphan”. Ishmael, the narrator, is the orphan-like wanderer. He is named for the son of Abraham and Hagar (servant to Abraham’s wife, Sarah) in the Old Testament, whom Abraham cast into the wilderness. Rachel (one of the wives of the patriarch Jacob) is the name of the boat that rescues Ishmael at the book’s end. Furthermore, the metaphysical whale reminds Christian readers of the biblical story of Jonah, who was thrown overboard by his fellow sailors who considered that he was causing ill fortune. Swallowed by a “big fish” he lived in its belly before God returned him to dry land. Seeking to flee from punishment, he only inflicted more suffering upon himself.

Besides literary references there are historical ones. The ship “Pequod” is named for the extinct New England Indian tribe; thus the name suggests the ship is doomed to destruction. As for whaling, it was a major industry, especially in New England: whale oil was used as an energy source, in particular for lamps. Whaling was also expansionist and linked with the idea of manifest destiny, since it required Americans to sail round the world. The “Pequod” crew represent all races and various religions, suggesting the idea of America as a universal state of mind as well as a melting pot of nations. Finally, Ahab embodies the tragic version of democratic American individualism. Ishmael is saved by a coffin made by his friend, the harpooner and Polynesian prince Queequeg. The designs on the coffin incorporate the history of the cosmos. The rescue is symbolic: from death life emerges again.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century although his reputation has declined over the course of the past century. He was born in Portland, Maine, but lived most of his adult life in Cambridge, the village outside Boston where many writers lived. One of his grandfathers was a state Senator and the other, a Revolutionary War general and a Congressman. Longfellow’s family also expected him to choose a career of public service. Instead he took up an academic career. Following his graduation from Bowdoin College, where he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow continued his education in Europe. Returning to the USA he taught European languages first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He resigned his position after 18 years of teaching.

Longfellow’s first book of prose, Hyperion, as well as his first volume of verse, Voices of the Night, appeared in 1839. His success as a poet led him to publish a second book, Ballads and Other Poems two years later. In 1843 he produced The Spanish Student, and in 1846, The Belfry Bruges. Although he lived in times of unrest, of revolutions in Europe and the Civil War in the United States, there was scarcely a repercussion of these events in his work.

Longfellow visited European countries and universities several times to improve his knowledge of European languages and literature. In Heilderberg he studied German Romanticism. He was heavily influenced by European culture and writing, and despite its versatility, much of his verse - both in terms of form and content - tends to be derivative and conforms to the popular literary tastes of the day. His adaptation of European methods of storytelling and his versification of poems was, however, successful. His most famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha(1858), deals with the legends of the American Indians. A technically accomplished poem, it draws on the trochaic metres of the Karelian-Finnish epic Kalevala to create a memorable and highly incantatory effect. His style and subjects – home, family, nature, and religion – were conventional, and over the years Longfellow’s position as a major American poet has declined. But in the late nineteenth century he was the most popular American poet both in the USA and in Europe.

During the last years of his life, Longfellow received many honours, including honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. After his death a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey – the first American to be so honoured.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Whitman was one of the most highly individual and important writers in the history of American literature. The publication of Leaves of Grass(nine revised and enlarged editions of which were published during his lifetime) in 1855 represented a revolutionary departure in American verse, both in terms of form and content.

Whitman was Dutch on his mother’s side and New England British on his father’s, the mixture to which he often attributed his genius. He grew up on Long Island, New York. His parents were simple country people with little education, but all his life Whitman was proud to be “one of the people”. In 1823, his family moved from the country to Brooklyn. His later poetry is filled with the sights and sounds of the country and city which impressed him so deeply as a child. His education came from different jobs in printing shops and newspapers. A firm believer in Jacksonian democracy and the splendour of the common man, Whitman owed much to the philosophical thought of Emerson. Speaking of his youth, Whitman wrote, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to the boil.”

Emerson was one of the few people to recognize the importance of Whitman's poetry when it first appeared, and wrote to him that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed to literature. Addressed to the citizens of the United States, Leaves of Grasswas a kind of autobiography in verse. Both prophetic and intimate, its glorification of democracy and the nation itself - its landscape and its people - was matched by an equally keen concern with the ideas, beliefs, experiences and emotions of the common man in an age which celebrated the value of individualism. This exaltation of the individual - in a physical as well as spiritual sense - commonly takes the form of the “I” in his poems, and yet Whitman was keen to stress that each person is contained in all other people in a kind of mystical unity of personality. Whitman’s idea of man and democracy was his personal expression of those hopes for a new man and new life which had existed in American society since the foundation of the American Republic.

Leaves of Grass was so fresh in style and so original in subject matter and technique that it aroused sharp discussion. The first edition of the book contained twelve poems and a Preface –a virtual manifesto of the author’s aims. Into the edition of 1856 thirty-three new poems were added, and a hundred and twenty-two more, into the edition of 1860. Only with the publication of the third edition Whitman realized that it was actually one long poem, with “I”, “Walt” who stood for all men. Most of the poems of Leaves of Grass are about man and nature. However, some poems deal with New York, the city that fascinated Whitman, and with the Civil War, in which he served as a volunteer male nurse. He envisioned the poet as a hero, a savior and a prophet, who leads the community by his expressions of the truth. In later editions of Leaves of Grass Whitman’s poems took on a more pessimistic outlook: the Civil War affected him deeply, as the group of poems called Drum Taps testify. His famous elegy on the death of President Lincoln, WhenLilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1865), betrayed a sense of anguished resignation and grief. His essay, Democratic Vistas (1871), is critical of American civilization, whose “deep disease” is “hollowness of heart”. However, he remained uncompromisingly true to his ideals till the end of his life, he never lost his faith in man and brotherhood, in transforming power of love, in humanity and life, and in the great poetry to come.

Whitman was apioneer in terms of technical innovation. He experimented with free verse in an attempt to liberate American poetry from the restrictions and rules of traditional stanza and rhyme forms. His so-called long line contained a variable number of unstressed syllables and no strictly fixed metre, and he organized his stanzas into what he called ”verse paragraphs.” Whitman was to exercise an influence on poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg.

EMILY DICKINSON(1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was the other great American poet of the nineteenth century, although her works remained almost completely unknown until the first collection of her poetry was published posthumously in 1890.

She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a prominent lawyer and politician and where her grandfather had established a n academy and college. She seldom left Amherst. After 1862 she became a total recluse, not leaving her house, nor seeing even close friends. Her retirement seems to have resulted mainly from her personality, from a desire to separate herself from the world. In the last years of her life she seldom saw visitors, but kept in touch with her friends through letters, short poems and small gifts. She defined her own poems as her “letters to the world”.

When she began writing poetry she had relatively little formal education. She did know Shakespeare and classical mythology and was especially interested in women writers such as Elizabeth Browning and the Bronte sisters. She was also acquainted with the works of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Though she did not believe in the conventional religion of her family, she had studied the Bible, and many of her poems resemble hymns in form. The range of her poetry suggests not her limited experience but the power of her creativity and imagination.

She wrote about 1,775 poems (which she called her letter to the world) in her lifetime, her most creative output coinciding with the Civil War. At this time she sent some of her work to Thomas Higginson, a prominent critic and author. He was impressed by her poetry, but suggested that she use a more conventional grammar. Emily Dickinson, however, refused to revise her poems to fit the standards of others and took no interest in having them published. In Higginson, nevertheless, she gained an intelligent and sympathetic critic with whom to discuss her work.

The majority of her poems are short and often beautifully crafted lyrics containing experimental rhythms and rhymes: she experimented freely with off (or imperfect) rhymes and with syntax, placing familiar words in the most unexpected of contexts. Her work possesses a conciseness which, together with her use of enigmatic images and dense metaphor, have led critics to compare her with the English Metaphysicals. Love and a lover, whom she either never really found or else gave up, death, nature, mortality and immortality, success, which she thought she had never achieved, and failure, which she considered her constant companion, are the main themes dealt with by this remarkably intense and sensitive poet. Emily Dickinson, like Melville, was undiscovered by the literary world in.

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