and William Carlos Williams". Similarly, Walter E. Bezanson notes the "curious mixture of the archaic and the contemporary both in language and materials", leading to the inclusion of antique words such as "kern, scrip, carl, tilth and caitiff", alongside modern technical terms taken "from ship and factory, from the laboratory, from trading, seafaring, and war." Commenting on the rhyme-scheme and the restricted meter, Bezanson responded to the common objection that Melville ought to have composed the work in prose, or at least in blank verse, arguing: To wish that Clarel had been written in blank verse, for example, is simply to wish for a completely different poem. In earlier years Melville had often set Shakespearean rhythms echoing through his high-keyed prose with extraordinary effect. But now the bravura mood was gone. Melville did not propose a broad heroic drama in the Elizabethan manner. Pentameter -- especially blank verse -- was too ample and overflowing for his present mood and theme. The tragedy of modern man, as Melville now viewed it, was one of constriction... Variations from the basic prosodic pattern are so infrequent as to keep the movement along an insistently narrow corridor. Reception Contemporary The poem was barely noticed on its original publication, and the few reviews that did appear showed that mainstream critical taste in the United States leant towards the polished, genteel lines of poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. The New York Times was the first to insist that "it should have been written in prose", while the reviewer for the World complained that he had got "lost in the overwhelming tide of mediocrity". The Independent called it a "vast work... destitute of interest or metrical skill", and Lippincott's Magazine claimed that there were "not six lines of genuine poetry in it". In his collection of these quotes, Walter E. Bezanson suggests that the overwhelmingly negative response was partly due to the fact that none of the critics had "actually read it", noting in particular the Lippincott critic's baffling comment that the poet was evidently a "bright and genial" individual, an observation entirely out of keeping with the tone of the vast majority of the work. Bezanson adds that Melville's "effort to cope with the major tensions of an age makes Clarel a historical document almost of the first order." He concedes that present day readers may be "baffled" by the poetic