Word: clarel
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Melville's career was incredibly uneven. The creator of Moby Dick was also the author of White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, and Pierre; or the Ambiguities, and the poet of Battle-Pieces was also the poet of Clarel, an amazingly inept pseudo-epic on Biblical themes. Warren's edition of Melville is a priceless edition to Melville scholarship, for the continuity it brings to the author's work, the way it integrates his fiction and verse in a coherent outline. At Warren's hands, the ambiguous Melville begins to make sense...
...gets better-the book is arranged more or less chronologically-until occasionally whole poems are free of howlers. Still the reader finds Melville awkward and even embarrassed in the presence of poetry, as if poetry were attended by a duenna and not a muse. His enormously long philosophical poem Clarel, which is excerpted here, is a sober, jointy affair in which pilgrims clatter painfully about the Holy Land thirsting after truth amid the waterless cantos...
Racing the Express. Iceboating is the fastest of all winter sports. In the 1870s, wealthy New York sportsmen got their kicks racing express trains along the Hudson River shore, and in 1908, a New Jerseyite named Elisha Price piloted his ice yacht Clarel to a speed record of 140 m.p.h. But iceboats soon yielded to icebreakers and year-round commerce on the Hudson, and the sport mostly moved West-to the Great Lakes, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The great (up to 68 ft.) old ice yachts that carried more than 1,000 square feet of sail gave way to light...
...before the war, Eddie deserted journalism twice to return to County Clare, the second time to marry. "Everyone knows the most beautiful women come from Ireland. And even MacCauley admitted that the most beautiful Irish women come from Clare. I went back to marry the most beautiful woman in Clarel" Doing defense work in Boston during the war, and odd jobs after, Eddie came to Lowell House...