box which yielded Billy Budd) and appeared in the final Constable volume titled Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Poetry Melville's reputation as a poet rose dramatically in the late 20th century. After the disastrous publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857, Melville turned to the writing of poetry. Virtually ignored by the public and scorned by reviewers, he nevertheless persevered in this endeavor for the next 30 years. Early biographers conveyed the perception of Melville as a novelist who dabbled unsuccessfully in verse. Despite early claims for him as one of the three best American poets before 1900, histories of American poetry for many years all but ignored him. The neglect was partly because until the Northwestern-Newberry edition, the poetry was available only in incomplete "complete" editions, selections, reprints, and editions of individual titles—most of these out of print, few of them textually reliable, and all of them together falling well short of completeness. "That Melville was a poet only in prose is a truth almost universally acknowledged among his critics, one guaranteed to endure as long as the poems remain unavailable in a complete, reliable edition." In July 2009 Northwestern-Newberry released Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11 the most complete collection to date, containing substantial scholarly notes on individual poems. The final volume (12), Billy Budd and Other Later Manuscripts contains the unpublished poems. The fact remains that Melville wrote fiction for 11 years, poetry for over 30. Although it is true he wrote more prose than poetry, the same can be said of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot both of whom wrote less verse than Melville did. With Clarel he wrote one of the longest poems in the English language. If one includes the poems contained in his novels his entire poetic oeuvre approaches the size of Lord Byron's or Robert Browning's. Collections Single poems "The Admiral of the White," published in 1885 in both the New York Daily Tribune and the Boston Herald. Uncollected or unpublished in Melville's lifetime Weeds and Wildings, with a Rose or Two (1924) A book of poems written for his wife and dedicated to her. Unpublished at the time of his death although a fair copy had been made by Elizabeth Melville for the printer. First published in Volume 16 of the Constable edition of Melville's Works (London 1924), then reprinted in a somewhat different order and form