Documentary Note on Melville's Marginalia in Matthew Arnold’s New Poems.

According to his autograph inscription on the verso of the half-title, Herman Melville acquired this copy of Matthew Arnold’s New Poems on February 13, 1871. His partially legible abbreviation “N.Y.” is erased, perhaps indicating a realization that he had acquired the volume elsewhere. New Poems is the second volume of Arnold’s poetry Melville is known to have acquired, after his acquisition of Poems (Sealts No. 21) in 1862. Sometime before or after he came into possession of New Poems, he wrote the publication date “1867” on a newspaper clipping advertising the edition as "in Press," and he pasted this to the front flyleaf of his copy of Arnold’s Poems. His interest in Arnold’s poetry may have been renewed by his reading of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (Sealts No. 17), acquired July 10, 1869. He continued to read Arnold throughout the 1880s, purchasing copies of Literature & Dogma (Sealts No. 18), Culture & Anarchy (Sealts No. 16), and Mixed Essays (Sealts No. 19). These volumes remained in the possession of the Melville family after Melville's death in 1891 and were among books donated to Harvard University by his descendants in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

All of the marginalia in this copy correspond to Melville’s characteristic pattern of marking, and although several of the annotations were partly or wholly erased, much of their content has been recovered. Other than the erasures, the only evidence of another hand in this volume is the unattributed pencil numerals in the upper left corner of the rear endpaper.

Publication: 2012, Melville's Marginalia Online. Jay Leyda first published selected annotations in this volume in The Melville Log (1951), 718-719. First transcribed in full by Walker Cowen, Melville's Marginalia, 2 vols., Harvard Dissertations in American and English Literature (New York: Garland, 1987), 1:68-72 (Cowen's dissertation was completed in 1965). Transcribed in a surrogate format at Melville's Marginalia Online, 2007.

Selected studies that cite this copy: Walter Bezanson “Melville’s Reading of Arnold’s Poetry,” Publication of the Modern Language Association, 69.3 (June, 1954): 365-391. Shirley M. Dettlaf, “Ionian Form and Esau's Waste: Melville's View of Art in Clarel.” American Literature 54.2 (May, 1982): 212-228. Peter Norberg, "Finding an Audience for Clarel in Mathew Arnold's Essays in Criticism." Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 6.1 (March, 2004): 35-54.