News at Eleven: Yet [Hershel] Parker shows convincingly

that [Herman] Melville was immersed in thinking about poetry, aesthetics and the lives of poets. Perhaps more important, he reveals that if Melville wanted to engage the loftiest or the deepest matters, then poetry, meaning verse, was the appropriate cultural form in which it should be done. His first published book of poems was "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War," the title suggestive of art, music and, grimly, other kinds of fragments.

from Los Angeles Times: The great American author didn't write poetry by accident, Parker argues, but entirely by plan.

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