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 style and with a compressed power uniquely his own. The fruit of decades of textual scholarship, this fourth and final volume of the Library of America Melville edition gathers for the first time in one volume all of Melville’s poems: the four books of poetry published in his lifetime, his uncollected poems, and the poems from two projected volumes of poetry and prose left unfinished at his death. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville’s first published book of poems, is one of the very few literary masterpieces to emerge from the Civil War. To read it today is to become immersed in the events of the great national crisis: the execution of “Weird John Brown,” the shock of the young Union soldiers at Bull Run “enlightened by the vollied glare,” the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, the brutal New York City Draft Riots, and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. By turns elegiac and enthusiastic, horrified and hopeful, the book recreates the experience of the Civil War home front, distilled by Melville’s singular genius. The heart of the volume is Melville’s epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), a work he spent seven years writing while employed as a New York customs inspector. The story of a young divinity student’s journey to Jerusalem and environs—a quest with both spiritual and sexual dimensions—the poem grew out of Melville’s own travels to Palestine two decades earlier. At 18,000 lines, it is one of the longest poems in the English language, inviting comparisons to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is also a deeply personal and revealing work, offering a picture of Melville’s complicated friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne through Clarel’s wavering attraction to a fellow traveler named Vine. Also included here are the two late privately published collections, his haunting nautical book John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon Etc. (1891), the latter containing the celebrated poems “After the Pleasure Party” and “The Age of the Antonines.” Rounding out the volume are the poems from Melville’s two unfinished manuscripts, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, along with miscellaneous uncollected poems, including “Billy in the Darbies,” the ballad that sparked the composition of Billy Budd. All are presented in authoritative texts established by the multi-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.