style, but "[o]nce we face up to the idea that Melville's poetry is not an extension of the lyric vein of his famous novels," we can accept that "essentially he was drawn to a non-lyrical, even harsh, prosodic line. Early 20th century Subsequent criticism, especially since the so-called "Melville Revival" of the early-20s, has been more positive about the poem. Frank Jewett Mather called it "America's best example of Victorian faith-doubt literature", and Raymond Weaver declared that it contained "more irony, vividness and intellect than almost all the contemporary poets put together." In 1924, amid the rising tide of literary modernism, the British critic John Middleton Murry approvingly noted the "compressed and craggy" quality of Melville's poetic line, and the French critic Jean Simon found "an extraordinary revelation of a tormented soul" in the work, but noted that the two volumes of the poem represented two essentially distinct spiritual crises. Post-World War II Seeing the whole work as an obscure elder sibling to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, literary scholar Richard Chase has argued that the "sterility of modern life is the central symbolic idea of the poem", and that, after the "extremities of titanism in Pierre", Melville reached the culmination of his later thought: "the core of the high Promethean hero". These remarks paved the way for a generation of critics who saw the poem as the crucial document of Melville's later years, such as Ronald Mason, who reads the poem as "a contemplative recapitulation of all Melville's imaginative life", and Newton Arvin, who calls it "Melville's great novel of ideas in verse". Melville's centennial epic is also his most direct commentary on the era of Reconstruction. In 1994, Harold Bloom chose Clarel as one of four Melville works to be included in his book The Western Canon. References and further reading Reprinted and slightly updated from the 1960 Hendricks House edition. Includes a "Critical Index of the characters" that briefly identifies and gives critical analyses. (pp. 613–635) Clarel: a Poem And Pilgrimage In the Holy Land. Edited, with an Introduction by Walter E. Bezanson. (New York: Hendricks House, 1960). Hathi Trust Digital Library (searchable full view). Text of the 1876 First Edition with corrections from a copy marked by Melville. Historical Note by Walter Bezanson reprinted from the 1960 Hendricks House edition and extensive notes on Biblical, historical, and literary allusions. Review of the Northwestern-Newberry edition. Notes