Herman Melville

John Marr and Other Poems Herman Melville

The "Inscription Epistolary" is to William Clark Russell, a British sea-story author who called Melville "the greatest genius the [United States] has produced" and "first" among the "poets of the deep."Like Timoleon, his other volume of late verse, scholars have assumed that it was a "private work of art," symptomatic of his withdrawal from the literary world. Melville was putting this collection together as he was also drafting Billy Budd, which, like several poems in this collection, had prose headnotes followed by full poems.