The great divide: creative writing pedagogy now

The numbers certainly are impressive. Hundreds of graduate programs in creative writing in the United States are graduating thousands of students each year, credentialing each as a certified producer of literature for an audience that, depending on who you ask, is either blossoming or moribund.  To receive this certification, students are investing one to three years of their lives and forking over anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 for an experience that promises nothing in the way of employment, fame, or financial remuneration. Other terminal, professional degrees like the MBA, MSW or MAT, promise a quick and nearly certain return on investment, while the MFA is, for most writers, an experience one pays for, rather than an investment one makes. Despite the slim odds of obtaining a teaching position, and the even slimmer odds of publication, for the thousands of graduate students who enter such programs each year, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Such rapid and consistent growth has posed interesting challenges to creative writing programs, which must now come to terms with their storied histories, challenges to their identity, and the skepticism that comes from the publishing industry, university English departments, and even from one’s parents and friends. Nearly one hundred years after the birth of the workshop, the old question of, “Can you really teach creative writing?” is apparently still unanswered to the satisfaction of many.

And if criticism from outside isn’t enough, there are skirmishes brewing within the creative writing empire as well. Differences in pedagogy, focus, and structure abound, and while change is generally a good thing, it must appear to recent alumni of MFA programs that their elite degree is close to becoming as worthless as the paper it is printed on. Witness the current bar-raising by university English departments, who, after having accepted thousands of dollars from MFA students for a “terminal” degree, are now offering PhD programs in the field that will render the MFA useful for writers but useless for teaching. This wouldn’t be too bad were it not that teaching, which has for so long become a means of economic support to supplement the meager income most writers receive from their creative pursuits, is what enables many writers to keep writing in the first place.

There is a great divide in creative writing. Creative writing programs were born in a time when writers were looking for a fast track to publication, the workshop model serving as a proving ground where only the strong survived. The continued existence of this model, despite the cultural and pedagogical changes of the last fifty years, still echoes the harsh realities of publishing, where far more submissions are received than can be printed, and only the “strong” make it to print. But this model that was once based firmly in “tough love” has softened as the interest in creative writing programs has broadened and its participants come to it with vastly different goals and expectations. Some might say that the increase in programs has created a shallow talent pool, where students receive only feel-good feedback about their work that does nothing to improve its quality. Others would counter that quality is completely relative and thus should not be measured as a goal.

This great divide, rooted in history and widened by growth, is creating an identity crisis in the profession that leaves prospective teachers to wonder who they are teaching and why. Are these programs designed to turn out highly polished writers capable of producing literature that will stand, if not the test of time, then at least rise above the slush pile; or, are they designed to help individuals connect with their inner self, to foster a nurturing environment where each writer can find his own voice regardless of whether or not it will be of interest to an audience? Are these programs designed to produce writers who are capable of writing and also of teaching others how to write; or, are graduates being thrown into the classroom solely to meet burgeoning undergraduate demand, with no understanding of pedagogy or training in how to best teach the trade they have learned? Are these programs rooted in a mentor/apprentice relationship where students will learn from and model themselves on successful writers; or, are the teachers mainly shepherds who gather their flocks lovingly and move them along to the next pasture? One thing I have learned is that there are no real answers, only very provoking questions that we each need to confront in order to build an effective pedagogical practice. And if you’re wondering if all this negativity has snuffed out my desire to spend fifteen months and $13,770 to pursue this same worthless piece of paper, the answer is no. It has stoked it.

In addressing these issues, it is vital that we consider who is asking the questions; before a highly individual educational philosophy can be reached, it is important to determine the audiences for whom we are reaching it and the expectations embedded in their desire to practice creative writing. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think audiences for creative writing instruction can be divided into three groups: the public at-large (not seeking academic credit), undergraduate students (including those majoring in English or creative writing), and professional and graduate students. Each brings to the discussion a unique set of needs and expectations, and while there is much overlap, I think the desires and expectations within each group are sufficiently similar. Furthermore, I believe that within each audience are individuals who have no higher goals for their writing than to produce work solely for themselves. While their desires are certainly legitimate, and while they can certainly learn from whatever instruction and feedback they receive, I’m not sure it is the place of a writing pedagogy to address these intrapersonal pursuits. Writing is certainly good therapy, I use it myself, but if therapy is the only aim, then a pedagogy addressing that is best left to art therapists and others who can contribute a psychological point of view. For my purposes, I am designing a pedagogy that is tailored to those who wish to improve their writing with the aim of sharing it with others, whether via national publication, blog, or family scrapbook.

These days, writers who seek instruction or feedback with no ties to academe have plenty of opportunities. From non-credit, online workshops with facilitation to virtual writing communities, the avenues for writers to pursue have expanded hand-in-hand with the explosion in computer technology and the Internet. While some of these writers might be seeking basic instruction, I feel more of them are seeking audiences for their work in the form of peer feedback, which they are as willing to provide as they are to receive. Thus, their expectations tend to be for “down and dirty” criticism, using the workshop more as a test audience than a learning classroom.

The needs and expectation of undergraduates run across boundaries, from the engineering student who enjoys writing poetry to the creative writing major who has known they wanted to be a writer since elementary school. In this context it is important to have a program that clearly identifies the goals for each course along the way, perhaps even going so far as to create different sections of the same course for students with different expectations. The generalist should have a welcoming environment where they can learn and develop their work in a safe haven, free from the kind of hyper aggressive feedback that might develop, say, in a class of creative writing majors. This segregation would largely be determined by the school and the scope of the program. Creative writing majors, many of whom will likely be headed for an MFA program, need a pedagogy that addresses their needs with more complexity and exposes them to the very difficult and competitive environments that might exist in MFA programs, along with helping them to determine which kind of MFA program might be right for them.

Professionals and graduate students I have lumped together, despite what I feel to be slightly different expectations. I define professional students as those who are already writers (perhaps journalists, copywriters, or technical editors) who want to begin or develop a creative writing practice as a way to balance their other writing obligations. Also included in this group are writers who have no desire to teach at all, but who want the rigor of an studio-based, academic program to help build their portfolio of work and lead them further along the path to publication. This group is likely seeking a more skilled and demanding audience than they would find outside the classroom, and will certainly be looking for the benefits of having a big name program exposing them to big name teachers, visiting writers, and agents and editors.

I tend to define graduate students as seeking a teaching credential first and publication second. Some may have entered the MFA program because, while they love to write, they know first and foremost that teaching writing is a slightly more attainable goal, although with record numbers of students receiving the MFA each year, that is certainly changing. As a side note for the teaching part of this audience, a well-developed course in pedagogy is urgently needed, and currently lacking, in many programs, especially given that many of them will teach undergraduates as part of their MFA financial package. As Kelly Ritter notes in her study of teacher training, even in creative writing PhD programs, where the emphasis on teaching should be even more pronounced, only 4 of 25 institutions require a course in pedagogy or teaching of creative writing specifically, while 23 of 25 require courses in the teaching of composition (218). This clearly demonstrates that the department administration believes that learning how to teach composition is similar to teaching creative writing, which, in my view, is completely misguided.

Even within these three audiences, we have not accounted for variations in talent, the level of education in reading and writing that students bring to the program, and a host of other concerns that teachers need to consider as they develop appropriate pedagogies. In a field with audiences as diverse as these-and I struggle to find any academic field that competes with this level of diversity-developing a single, fixed pedagogy is impossible and irresponsible. Instead, I believe we should develop a core set of beliefs that are flexible enough to balance these competing and complimentary audiences and expectations.

Balancing the great divide: the Ten Commandments of teaching creative writing

So how are we to develop a pedagogy that satisfies our own sense of what is needed, as well as the expectations placed on us by so many different factors, such as the challenges of history and theory, and the diversity of audiences and expectations? I believe the answers lie in balance and flexibility. In my life, a strong sense of balance has been central to my personal development and professional growth. I have come to find that both intellectually and spiritually, taking the middle path and practicing moderation whenever possible are central to my success and survival. So it stands to reason that the most important concept in the development of my personal creative writing pedagogy is this notion of balance. Between theory and practice, between writing for self and writing for others, between vision and revision, between planning and improvisation, between freedom and restraint, between absolutes and relatives, between craft and criticism, between art and life, between leading and guiding, between pragmatism and dream, all must be taught and explored in a manner jointly determined by the goals of the group and the goals of the program. But with changing paradigms in the field, and such a diversity of audiences and expectations, flexibility in one’s beliefs is just as important. So while the original Ten Commandments were cast in stone, I prefer to etch these in sand, a nod towards impermanence and constant change.

I.            Thou shall teach both theory and practice

I find it impossible to fathom that writer and longtime teacher Madison Smartt Bell once said, “…for writers to get more involved with theoretical criticism [is] wrong” (Neubauer 11). The workshop, and creative writing programs in general, function as a sort of testing ground for new works, which by definition, means evaluating and critically examining those works along the line of the author’s intent. And while I realize that today’s contemporary critical theory as practiced by the rest of the English department is concerned with just the opposite-divorcing reading from writing altogether-there are certainly ways to meld it into our workshops, and we have a responsibility to do so.

At first glance, it may seem that teaching contemporary literary theory is completely incongruous with teaching creative writing, but as Jay Parini suggests, there are plenty of opportunities to use theory to open up new avenues and develop new voices, especially through the study of rhetoric, where “literary theory and creative writing should and can meet [to gain] knowledge of the most productive ways of ‘making’ language, of creating meaning and eliciting responses within the bounds of predictability” (130). In addition to the study of rhetoric, where writers and critics may have the most to gain from each other, I have personally found studies in poetics, prosody, linguistics, structuralism, post-structuralist narratology, and reader-response theory to be extremely interesting and useful in my work as a writer.

But beyond the usefulness of theory as applied to generating or evaluating work, we should teach our students theory simply on the grounds that if they ever expect to work in higher education, they will come face-to-face with it. In some cases, they will have to defend themselves from it, in others they may actually find themselves teaching it. Theory is an important component in discussing literature today, and it would be negligent of us to send prospective teachers into the classroom without an understanding of both sides of the theory debate. In fact, for English majors headed towards advanced study in literature, as opposed to creative writing, creative writing instructors may provide the only exposure to theory from a writer’s perspective that they ever encounter.

II.            Thou shall teach students to neither mistake, nor suppress, themselves for their audience

George Garrett, writer and esteemed teacher both at Hollins College and at the University of Virginia, believes “it’s not necessarily the chief purpose and function of a writing course to produce writers. [The goal] is to satisfy a need felt by these people” (Neubauer 114). While the marketing professional in me would agree, the writer in me would counter that at some point, the writer needs to sail on or jump ship, especially within the confines of a workshop or program in an academic setting.

In order not to silence the creative space in the classroom, we must give our students the complete freedom and flexibility to experiment and write about whatever interests them. Still, they must also come to understand that not everyone, perhaps not anyone, will share their interest in a particular topic or their presentation of a particular work. How then to balance the need for self-expression, with the idea that most writing, certainly the kind being produced in a advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, is designed to be read by somebody other than the writer himself. Inherent in this idea is the notion that as we evaluate writing in the workshop, we must continually ask, who are you writing for?

This pursuit of the writing life is a very solitary and personal journey, and most of the writing we do will be seen by our eyes only. But if we aspire to publication of any kind, we must keep in mind the idea of audience, not just the individual readers, but also the individual editors and publisher who are the gatekeepers to the reading public. It is thus important to maintain a balance between writing for ourselves and writing for others, and we must help the writer develop the instinct to know which writing to present at what time.

Most would agree that we need to create a space where students feel comfortable baring their naked aesthetic for all to see, but as Jane Smiley writes, students must also discover how to “become teachable, that is, to become receptive” (244). Within this paradox, we need to give students the freedom to create, but also enable them also to learn from the feedback than helps them to grow as writers.

Writing guru Natalie Goldberg says, “I don’t think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die” (xii). The challenge for us, as teachers, is to coax those stories out and to help the writer decide for herself where those stories might be best heard.

III.            Thou shall articulate the difference between vision and revision

The exercises and encouragement we provide for visioning (i.e. creating the initial draft or first thoughts) must be different from what we offer to those in the process of revision, (i.e. seeing again). Rules, guidelines and qualitative expectations will hinder the process that is needed to create new material and to get those wild thoughts down on paper for the first time. If, as Teresa Amabile’s studies suggest “increased productivity may be our most accessible means of engendering creativity,” then I believe we must provide encouragement that is measured in quantity not quality, and is concerned more with process than product (Sarbo 141).

I am a strong advocate for Goldberg’s notion of writing practice, where “the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel” (9).

As Goldberg suggests, too many times we write with the end in mind, with a particular audience or publication goal in sight. When we do, we do not allow enough time for the work to develop naturally; we do not maximize the good raw material available from which to choose. Editing and marketing are important, but as Haake suggests, “these (professional and institutional) concerns are most properly addressed after, not before the writing” (72). By measuring student productivity in raw material rather than finished product, we encourage them to write without internal censors. By teaching different tactics for vision and revision we help set reasonable and more targeted expectations for student work.

Particularly in introductory level workshops, I would implement Goldberg’s timed-exercise practice, which entails writing within a basic set of rules for a set time-limit. The rules are simple and include: keep your hand moving; don’t cross out; don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar, staying within the margins or the lines on the page; lose control; don’t think; don’t get logical; go for the jugular; explore “scary” or naked” thoughts (Goldberg 8).

While I strongly believe in the usefulness of guided writing and free journaling as means of generating raw material, the process of revision, rather, is something that each writer must discover for himself. There is something to be said for listening to the workshop and another for determining their voice and what it is that they want to say, receiving feedback openly and without prejudice, but being brave enough to stay true to themselves. T. Coraghessan (Tom) Boyle, award-winning writer and teacher in the writing program at the University of Southern California, still believes in the bubble approach as the best means for beginning the revision process. “What’s relevant is for the author to discover what intelligent people think he or she meant, then they can go from there” (Neubauer 25).

I agree that it is beneficial for the writer to be exposed to this kind of feedback between the vision and re-vision stages. And while sensitivity in the workshop is important, it is also important, particularly at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level, to balance this sensitivity with tough, constructive criticism. As Boyle also says, “I’ve been in workshops [where] everyone [is] so supportive, loving each other. Great. But what’s accomplished? Nothing. I’m very tough line-to-line. This is professional” (Neubauer 25). This kind of professional feedback will help develop the writer’s ability to determine what feedback to accept and what to throw away, which may be the single most important component of a writer’s learning process.

IV.            Thou shall create a plan and be prepared to improvise

As amorphous as the nature of writing instruction continues to be, we must not develop pedagogies that are fixed. We must be prepared to adapt our methods, and maybe even our core beliefs to match the goals of the program, the class, and the individual student. This does not mean that we should sacrifice our own beliefs for some other that we may not agree with, but we have to understand that students and programs change in response to market conditions, and that we, as facilitators and service providers, need to adapt as well. Some programs will clearly require teachers who have a strong classroom presence. Imagine how one might teach in a hyper competitive program like Iowa, where students expect and deserve strong leadership and hard work. Such an approach might not work in a junior college environment or in a classroom of undergraduates, yet we might find ourselves being asked to teach in one environment one semester and another environment the next. We must adapt if we are to be successful, and such adaptation requires us to have a plan within which we have the freedom to improvise.

I think it is important to see our workshops as part of the whole. One cannot create the framework for a class without understanding the personality of that class and the needs of the course. Likewise, one cannot develop a course without examining how the course serves the larger program and how the program serves the university and the students. We as teachers must remember that our role is to lead, but also to serve. One way to stay nimble is to remain connected to the larger field of pedagogical studies, both in creative writing and also in composition, so that we can benefit from what others have experienced in different educational contexts. Moreover, unless I’ve missed it, our profession desperately needs a journal dedicated both to pedagogical questions and to practical concerns in teaching creative writing.

V.            Thou shall encourage and practice freedom with restraint

We as writers have the freedom of speech guaranteed to us by the constitution, but with this freedom comes the responsibility to be accurate, truthful and respectful, both in our writings, and particularly in the criticism of the writings of others. This freedom is one of the blessings of western democracy, there are many writers in this world who do not have it, and it is for their sake and in their honor that we must understand the value of ours and fight to keep it.

This notion of freedom and restraint must also apply to how we treat others in the workshop, how we prejudge and respond to literature created outside our own culture, how we understand and conceive of approaches to literary study, and how we alter our pedagogies to reflect cultural and theoretical shifts. In the past twenty years, great changes have been made to the “canon” through the hard work of young faculty who insist that the works and voices of women and underrepresented groups be heard in literature and writing classrooms. I applaud this effort and am glad to see young students exposed to such a wide and diverse group of voices, a diversity which, deservedly so, matches that of the students themselves and one from which I never benefitted as a young student. But this redefining of the canon has created an environment where works of literary quality and pedagogical value are being forsaken simply on the basis of their connection to the “old” canon. In this way we are not broadening the canon to reflect our diversity, but rather narrowing it by a process of swapping out one culture’s works for another, as if the size must remain constant. So while we must be grateful to finally have the freedom to teach more representative works, we must also continue to have respect for works which, rightly or wrongly, have an intertextual connection that is central to the development of western literature.

VI.            Thou shall boldly state absolutes in the realm of the relative

Permit me this one digression. This is a pet peeve of mine and perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to postmodernism, but relativism doesn’t work for everyone. In some ways, the notion that everything is relative, while philosophically true, is intellectually false. It conveys that, for some, even feces can taste like fudge. If one strongly identifies with a certain belief, provided they recognize that it may not be so for everyone (acknowledge its relativity) we must acknowledge that for them (in their mind, their reality) it is an absolute truth.

Particularly in upper level programs, writers need to hear when something they’ve tried doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work for anyone in the room, despite the fact that this reaction is relative, it might be considered to be absolutely a bad idea to leave it as-is. If, as teachers, we are to speak in absolutes, however, it is important to remember our role and responsibility. As David Huddle at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College writes, “It is not my duty to tailor my teaching to each individual student; it is not my duty to attempt to make writers of my students. It is my duty to be a certain kind of a teacher, to try to be consistent in the values that I try to convey to my students, and to let them use me as they will [...]” (75). This consistency helps reinforce that there are absolutes in the world of the relative, and relatives in the world of the absolute.

VII.            Thou shall teach reading and writing, and the importance of both

Eve Shelnutt, poet, writer and former teacher at Ohio University, maintains “Many writers choose to write without having done the necessary preparation, and that is: to become readers. There is a kind of arrogance we have given young writers that lets them assume that ignorance is not something to be critical of” (Neubauer 206).

In this current age of teaching for the test in high schools, most new undergraduates are far too under-read to approach creative writing with any of the necessary prerequisites. While once considered the domain of literature classrooms, teaching reading through the eyes of craft is central to the writer’s understanding of how language works and how meaning manifests. However, in the critical revolution of the last 30 years, the focus on craft analysis in literature classrooms has all but disappeared, leaving it to creative writing instructors to pick apart the text with an eye towards how it was assembled.

If I were to be hired to design a creative writing program, graduate or undergraduate, I think I would ascribe to the model currently in use at the Bennington Writer’s workshops, which is summed up in their new advertising slogan: “Read 100 books, Write 1″. I would like to implement a system where the program selects 50 books and the student chooses the other 50, half of which are subject to approval from the chair. As these books are read, writers would be challenged to respond to them in writing, to examine their own views of how the texts worked on them, and to determine what lessons they might take away to be used in their own work.

VIII.            Thou shall coach students to strive for art but be prepared for life

Creative writers, like most artists, need to be in it for the long run. As Natalie Goldberg writes, “Art lives in the Big World. One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It is the process of writing and life that matters” (12).

Oscar Wilde’s claim that “all art is quite useless” never rang more true than in today’s market of reality television, shortened attention spans, and the general decline of reading for pleasure, as noted in reports like Reading at Risk from the National Endowment for the Arts. So then why do we write, and furthermore, why do we strive to write something that has as its goal, something higher than commonality?

One reason is our own judgment system (an absolute in the realm of the relative), which tells us that some things are simply better than others, so we strive to write at that level. Still, writing is more than product; it is process. As Eve Shelnutt writes, “…creative writing is not just another course. It is a profound question that’s being asked. I feel that I have to have students understand the questions that art poses to them, in terms of a way to live, a focus of their minds in study and the rewards that it can contain” (Neubauer 197).

So as we work hard to produce “art” we should be prepared to enjoy what else writing brings to us: the ability to get our innermost thoughts and dreams down on paper; the encouragement to express ourselves in a way that differs markedly from what we speak and how we act; and the pure desire to leave our imprint on the world. But the skills we learn in creative writing are just as applicable to “real life” as to art. Students gain an understanding of literature and enjoyment of language, and those skills increase our appreciation of everything we read and improve our ability to compose writing of all kinds. Within the writing life we also build a sense of community of likeminded people, a group that shares our appreciation for what is, inherently, a lonely, almost futile, pursuit. It’s good to have someone else along for the journey.

I agree with Chris Green, who writes, “Life as a writer in the social world means more than just writing poems…it means negotiating the vast, complex, nebulous, tyrannical, ever present, varied structures and institutions of publication, education, readings, employment, community, politics and family. For teachers of creative writing, the trick is to make these lessons apparent to the student” (155).

IX.            Thou shall lead as an equal

Famed creative writing teacher Wallace Stegner says it best: “How can anyone ‘teach’ writing, when he himself, as a writer, is never sure what he is doing?” (9). I see our job as facilitating learning, and if we are to create a forum for the improvement of writing that also encourages the freedom to take risks, then the feedback we provide, especially as the facilitator, needs to provoke the student writer’s own sense of discovery. Rather than prescribe solutions or recite gospel, we can ask the writer questions that she may not be able to ask herself. We can help guide the students to their own conclusions by presenting the workshop as a hired test audience for our work, a group of individuals whose varied backgrounds and abilities mirror those of the other readers in the marketplace. It’s a focus group, not a jury,

Katherine Haake writes that every student “is capable of surprising both me and her- or himself, and … my job as a teacher is to create the structure within which surprise can occur” (64). I believe surprises occur where suggestions overtake demands and guidance supplants prescription. Monk Shunryu Suzuki expresses a Zen proverb that I often fail to heed: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few” (21). By keeping our own mind in this state, we can provide our students with endless opportunities and avenues to pursue. By diminishing the role and expectations of us as the “experts,” we encourage them to write without fear.

Not all our students will publish, or even want to, so we need to demonstrate , as Haake writes, the principle that “Writing is an act of faith, yes, but it is just as much a way of life that provides an organizing structure for the way we are in this world” (76). For many of us, to learn to write is to learn how to live.

We also need to lead by example, that is, to write along with our students and to share our works with them in a spirit of open dialogue. David Huddle, who submits his own creative work for his students to review, feels “I’m a better writer for having submitted my writing to the workshop for scrutiny, and I hope my workshops are more nourishing communities as a result of my having brought my work into them” (79). So while, it is certainly risky to show the leader’s weaknesses in draft form, the long term benefits to the students will most certainly outweigh the short term pain to the teacher!

X.            Thou shall temper the dream with pragmatism

Eve Shelnut remarks, “I suppose a lot of my work…is in helping [students] answer the question, ‘Why would anyone spend an entire lifetime producing art?’” (Neubauer (207).

Many of those who enroll in graduate creative writing courses do so for the goal of publication. They write because they love to write, and they hope to one day achieve some sort of recognition for their efforts. Many of them know the odds they are facing, and some would argue that it is not the business of teachers to squash their dream of making a living with their creative writing. But I would argue that anyone getting into this profession should be aware of the business side of writing and the risks it entails. Not only should we be taught how to submit for publication, understand what the specific markets and opportunities are, and be exposed to publishers and editors who can share insights about the publishing process, but also we should be exposed to other ways that we might pay off the significant educational loans we have incurred as a result.

The skills taught in creative writing are useful in professional writing of various kinds. Journalism, advertising, fundraising are just a few of the fields where I have been able to get paid for my writing talents, and while the works weren’t always poetic or fictional, they were always creative. In some ways, one might argue for a course that focuses specifically on creative nonfiction, which has the largest degree of applicability to other forms of professional writing. I believe we owe it to the students to allow them the space to pursue their dream, but to also expose them to the pragmatic acts of the writer’s existence that may be what enables them to pursue that dream in the first place.

The idea of tempering the dream must also be broached through the necessary evils of grading and evaluating student work. In what is seen as purely subjective, in what is touted as a world of relativism, in an environment where we are supposed to encourage safety and freedom, how can we fairly, and in good conscience, rank anything? Here I tend to embrace three ideas that make me feel at least comfortable doing so.

First, on evaluation, I believe a term’s worth of student work should be evaluated based on the portfolio method, which looks at improvement over time and takes into account, responsiveness, participation, timeliness, and engagement with the subject matter and assignments. Simply put, this is a writing class, so please write and get better as you go.

Second, on grading, I believe in the British model of Excellent, Satisfactory, and Failing, or in an American context, A, B, F. Everyone who meets the requirements gets a B; some small percentage, perhaps never more than ten or twenty, get an A; and the F is reserved for those who for one reason or another, simply fail to meet the basic requirements of the course.

Third, I would encourage one-on-one meetings throughout the course where students can receive frank and open feedback about how I feel their work is going. This private meeting enables me to judge just how serious the student is about writing and ask them what level of feedback they would like. So on a one-to-one level, if they want me to be tough, so be it. If on the other hand they show no real affinity for writing as a career or cannot placate their emotions enough to receive tough feedback, then perhaps I could offer more gentle encouragement. In this way I can measure their desires and expectations and meet them outside of the rubrics and confines of university grading or workshop evaluation environments.

Bridging the great divide: flexibility and understanding

So, despite my offering these perspectives as the voice of God, I’ll reiterate again that I see these commandments as set in sand, not stone. The decision of how to balance these individual guidelines, both within each juxtaposition I have presented, and in relation to each other within the course or program as a whole, must lie with the department, the teacher, and the individual students. It is, therefore, important to strive for balance within balance, like the ancient Zen monks who occasionally got roaring drunk as a way of demonstrating moderation in moderation. Every now and again, it must be OK to weigh more heavily on one side or the other.

Nicholas Delbanco, writer and faculty member in the University of Michigan writing program, states his own commandments thus:

The only way to learn one’s art is through back-breaking labor that must not seem like work. After the seeming-impossible has become difficult, the difficult habitual, and the habitual easy, true mastery begins. We must listen to the verdict of the judge-whether it be praise, dispraise, or the most likely, a suspended sentence-then appeal. We must work through derivation toward the original voice-remembering that “originality” is likely to be a compound of influence so multiform and various it cannot be assessed. We need to know an oxymoron from chiasmus to know freedom within limits as the root and force of syntax. Our certainties will turn to doubt, our rote learning grow improvisational (40).

It is my hope that through developing, practicing, and altering my commandments, that I might develop a means to balance the acrimony between factions both within the English departments and within creative writing programs. I find it painfully ironic that, in the academic world where relativism reigns, individuals are so set in their own views and ways that they fail to see the benefits of what we can learn from each other. We should all be free to evolve, to discover, and perhaps with greater compassion, to practice what we teach.

Works Cited

Delbanco Nicholas. “Judgment: An Essay.” Writers on Writing. Eds. Pack, Robert and Jay Parini. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 29-40.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.

Green, Chris. “Materializing the Sublime Reader: Cultural Studies, Reader Response, and Community Service in the Creative Writing Workshop.” College English 64 (2001): 153-174.

Haake, Katharine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

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Drummers and poets are used like ashtrays YES
       –Howard Hart

A jazz poem cannot be removed from its musical context, and as such, mandates a musical approach to its prosody. In this essay, I will propose a terminology for discussing a prosody of jazz and examine the influences of jazz music on the form and sound of jazz poetry. To illustrate this prosody, I will introduce a percussive system of scansion that applies monotonic, binary musical notation to the lines of verse, thereby suggesting one possible performance. I will then apply this prosody to the works of Langston Hughes that exhibit three common jazz forms: the blues, boogie-woogie, and bebop.

The ease with which we identify a piece of music as “jazz” is not shared by its verbal stepsister. One recently standardized definition of jazz poetry as “poetry in some way informed by jazz music” is perhaps the clearest explanation available to further delineate jazz poetry from the broader free verse that emerged in the early 20^th century (Feinstein 2). Anthologists argue that poems about jazz music or jazz musicians qualify as jazz poetry, and perhaps they do, but I would qualify that view: they are only jazz poems if the sound of the poems provide an echo to the sense of the music itself. From a prosodist’s view, it is hard to categorize a sonnet about jazz music as jazz poetry, especially if it does not differ in any rhythmic way from a sonnet about Queen Elizabeth. For purposes of this essay, I will consider jazz poetry as poems that sound like jazz through rhythm and form.

This concept of sound is important in fusing poetry and music together. Attempts to apply musical prosodies to other forms of poetry have failed for a variety of good reasons, yet the flaw frequently lies in the stringency of analysis. These prosodists use a musical scansion to impose a musical construct on a poetic form, “yoking them by violence together”; jazz poets, on the other hand, impose a poetic construct on a musical form. The rhythms, phrasing, and forms of jazz music are implicit in the work, sonically or textually, and since music is the form, a musical prosody is potentially more useful than others. Furthermore, in the poetry of jazz there is reason to believe that the poet has a certain musical rhythm in mind, and thus, if a musical scansion is applied, such an interpretation may benefit the performance and understanding of the poem. A chief aim of the jazz poet is to effectively capture the rhythms of the music he echoes. As such, a musical prosody should be the most revealing prosodic approach, much more accurate than foot prosodies, and slightly more comprehensible than the systems of Attridge and Cureton, though they could each be applied to many jazz poems.

It should also be noted that by the above definition many jazz poems could be song lyrics. For purposes of this essay, however, my primary concern is with poems that, while using jazz forms and rhythms, are not in themselves lyrics to a specific song, although they might lend themselves to this application. To a further degree, I will not consider the pitch of an utterance as a factor in this prosody. All prosodists seem to agree that syllables have a pitch, yet few consider it relevant to prosodic study. Pitch is not a model of poetic form, does not wholly concern rhythm, and is too subject to performative variations.

Under these conditions-informed by jazz music, sound equaling sense, form based on music, concern solely with rhythm and not pitch-we can capture the essence of a poetry that effectively represents the music it implies. Its sound is born of rhythm, its form comes from music, and its sense derives from the idiomatic language and social concerns of the jazz era. All three of these contribute to a poem’s jazz, and we must turn to African-American culture in order to locate its musical and poetic roots. The rhythms of jazz are the rhythms of a rigorous existence and are manifest in varied constructs: from the gospel choirs of the southern churches, to the field songs and chants of slave laborers, to the ancient tribal ceremonies of Africa where, not coincidently, they were preceded by percussion-pure rhythm. These rhythms and forms performed on European and American instruments gave rise to the jazz music we now recognize, yet the evolution has not stopped: rock and roll, rap, and country-western music derive from the swung rhythm and blues progressions of jazz.

Percussive Scansion

If, as we have said, prosody is concerned with rhythm and not pitch, then it would behoove us to simplify the systems of musical notation to accommodate this limitation. Fortuitously, a composer at some point decided to eliminate the multilinear staff for monotonic percussion instruments, recognizing the improved readability of the notation, which consequently removed all possibility of polytonic interpretation. This composer also recognized the binary nature of most percussion instruments, in that the notes are rarely sustained for any length of time. For example, when tapping a table there is no duration to the tap, and certainly not one tap that lasts longer than another. The table does not ring like a cymbal or maintain a continuous tone, like an oboe. Thus, the composer slightly altered the linear representation of beats and rests, much as is indicated in the music provided to percussionists in an orchestra. The following is a passage as reduced by our composer, maintaining the same rhythm but eliminating sustained notes and polyphony:

Unlike the human voice, but very much like a printed poem, percussion instruments have a binary (either audible or silent) system of performance, and a variety of possible notations that could all produce the same sonic result. For example, the two measures below, though notated differently, would each yield the identical result when played on a drum:

Not only would the above measures sound differently from each other if performed on the oboe, but each oboist’s interpretation of the same measures might also yield a slightly altered result. Even though the first measure of the phrase consists of a two-beat note followed by two single beats, the time at which an individual musician would stop blowing the first note will vary somewhat, yet they will all begin to blow the second note at the same time. This is not altogether different from the performative variations demonstrated by readers of English language verse, in that the duration of the syllable is not as important as the strength and distance between syllables. Since most percussion instruments are monotonic and binarily simplified, they are less open to variations of the performer. Even the intensity of volume is less variable, because a binary percussion instrument is unable to sustain a continuous tone; a single tone cannot get louder if it is not sustained. Though not entirely unheard of, secondary stress is uncommon in the percussive lexicon. In general, notes are either stressed or unstressed, which when combined with rests, provide the three types of musical pulse discussed in greater detail below. This does not mean, however, that percussive notation is completely devoid of interpretive possibility. As in a recitation of verse, variations in tempo and volume occur frequently, both within a performance and from performer to performer.

As with all scansion, this method provides just one interpretation, and as such, should be considered analogous with the usefulness of a musical score to a musician. It indicates the stresses, non-stresses, and pauses, and the relationship between them in time. Further, our scansion will ignore other indicators in a musical score, such as fluctuations of tempo and volume within the piece. These variations are similar to the deviation from one reader to the next and thus can be ignored in applying a percussive scansion to poetry. What the scansion does provide is a sufficient, rhythmic notational framework to ensure an acceptable reading by an informed reader.

The root of a jazz prosody must also derive from what one scholar calls “keeping it in the head,” bringing the musical tradition to bear on the reading of the verse (Dickson 30). For example, poets celebrating the improvisational aspects of the jazz form may use orthographic means to indicate a reading, such as long spaces at the beginning of a line, or words displayed vertically within a poem. This is particularly common in the jazz poetry since 1950, in which the poems are intended to be reflective of the emergence of a “free jazz.” Such a movement away from tradition is not dissimilar to the movement towards a “free verse” that preceded free jazz by 30 years. In other ways, a poet might use idiomatic language that is predisposed to a particular reading, or use scat language to replicate a familiar rhythmic phrase like “bop bop a rebop…a wop bam boom.” All these sounds combined with poetic images, like Langston Hughes’s hunchbacked pianist pounding his foot on the floor, are a necessary part of the assumptions and predispositions of an informed reader of jazz poetry.

Jazz Prosody

Now we turn to the terminology of jazz prosody, which in essence is to turn to all the definitions that have come before. In this case, the terminology must be made especially clear, particularly when striving to use words common to both musical and literary theory. As demonstrated, a prosody of jazz should use a percussive scansion to indicate a possible performance and to clarify a poet’s rhythmic intent. The easiest way to correlate the rhythms of music to the rhythms of language is to examine them through the terminology and function common to each.

Monotonic sound relies on three levels of indication: pulse, meter, and rhythm. Pulse is the most fundamental unit of measure, and serves as a constant current on which the utterances travel. A pulse corresponds to one syllable in length and thus its frequency will vary based on the overall tempo of the reading. The terms beat and offbeat have been prosodically utilized, but they can be easily confused with their musical counterparts, which are used to group pulses into equal, metric units and to differentiate a pulse falling at the beginning of the unit (beat) from one falling mid-way through the unit (offbeat). A prosodic pulse works at the level of a note, or rest, in music. As in music, poetic pulses may be designated in three ways: stressed, unstressed or silent, corresponding roughly to Attridge’s beat, offbeat, and implied offbeat.

Meter, the second level of indication, is a unit of measure resulting from grouping of pulses into recurring patterns, typically consisting of two (duple) or three (triple) pulses per unit. For all its emphasis in poetics, meter in music serves mainly as an organizational tool with which to make a distinction between pulse and rhythm. Meter gathers pulses and organizes them according to quantity and quality, number and duration. In so doing, it provides the basic framework of the music. Yet from a purely rhythmic point of view, the grouping of pulses is not important: even with the bar lines (measure separators), beams (horizontal lines connecting notes together) or words removed, there still exists a longer rhythm made up of pulses. Prosodic meter works at the level of the musical measure, though its focus is more on configuration (the quality and pattern of pulses) rather than duration (number of pulses within a given time frame).

At the third level, rhythm can be defined as a song of pulses, the overall conformance or deviation of a series of metric groupings from the predominant meter that occurs throughout a line or a poem. A rhythm consists of a sequence of meters that may or may not be the same as the underlying meter, which also allows that a rhythm may consist of more than one meter. At the higher level of phrasing, of the kind explored by Cureton, rhythm can also convey the progression from line to line and highlight conformance or deviation between line and stanza. At this level, rhythm stands in contrast to itself, which can be defined as syncopation, or what has unfortunately come to be known as counterpoint. (Counterpoint is a correlative of harmony, which requires the polyphony of more than one level of tone. We are concerned with monotonic sound in the study of prosody.) Rhythm works at the level of melody in music, in that when polyphony is absent, it serves as the next recognizable abstraction. For example, when we read the phrase, “shave and a haircut…two bits” and call to mind the melody implied by those words by an informed reader, we can remove the melody and the words, tap the rhythm on a table, and still recognize the phrase as an identifiable, rhythmic unit. Having attracted your attention, if I knock “shave and a haircut” on one side of a wall, you will likely provide the last two knocks of the rhythmic phrase.

As our terminology implies, it is the layering of rhythm atop meter atop pulse that provides the variations and forms from which music and poetry are constructed. Deliberately omitted from this construct are interpretations of units of poetic line or musical measure. These serve as an intermediate group between meter and rhythm, but need not be utilized in the scansion because there exists a fundamental difference between poetic and musical usage: measures for musicians are really a random, typographic, organizational convenience, while the poetic line, with all its syntactic value, is quite possibly the most important unit for the poet. As such, an attempt should not be made to indicate line breaks in musical scansion, and yet, a judgment must still be made by the performer as to how or whether to acknowledge them at all. In the blues poems below, lengthy rests have been left in the scansion between the line pairs, even though no performer would insert such a long pause in the midst of a poetic reading.

What must be acknowledged in a jazz prosody is what can be called the swing imposition. A swung meter results from a combination of duple and triple meter: duple in the sense that two pulses form the basis of the meter, yet triple because these are really two sounded pulses separated by a third silent pulse. The first measure below indicates a standard triple meter; the second illustrates the resulting duple meter after swing is applied.

This swing feel resulted from a simplification of the underlying triple meter of the earliest blues forms to two sounded pulses separated by a silent pulse. In essence, 123 123 became 1 31 3, the stressed 1 demanding a slight, additional pause before the unstressed 3. Herein lies the primary difference between jazz and the music that preceded it, but rather than being seen as something entirely new, it should be viewed as a blend between the two dominant musical, and poetic, forms of duple and triple meter. An illustration of this imposition still exists in musical notation today. Jazz orchestrators will frequently indicate the rhythm as portrayed in first or second measures below when they clearly intend for it to be played as in the third measure.

This swinging of rhythm opened up new possibilities for music, founded on the integration of duple and triple meter that subsequently produced much of the rhythmic syncopation in jazz music. The constant flux created by this integration also eased the ability of musicians to improvise, another important foundation of the jazz aesthetic.

Poetically, the additional pulses in each measure gained by the imposition of 3 on 2 offers the poet the flexibility to add more unstressed syllables between stresses. In this way, trisyllabic words can randomly occur within a primarily duple meter without the poet’s having to reestablish the emphasis of the meter later in the line. Yet instead of utilizing all three pulses within a meter, many poets deliberately elide trisyllabic words or phrases into two syllables, as when they change “I’m going” to “Ise gwine.” The use of dialect and idiom almost always helps to convey an intended rhythmic reading of the poem. Also accommodated by the swing imposition is the tendency of stressed syllables to last slightly longer than unstressed ones in general speech. This natural tendency, exploited by jazz, helps to keep the stress on the first pulse of a meter.

The importance of the swing imposition, and the freedoms it allowed to poets and composers, readers and musicians, had a large impact on the body of verse that evolved and the rhythms that occur in jazz poetry. This impact is particularly advantageous to a musical prosody. The detractors of earlier musical prosodies cite the mathematic precision of music as unfit for the less regular, temporal expression of verse. This is unfounded because variation in musical tempo, even within the same phrase or measure, is commonly used for emphasis or resolution and can vary from performer to performer. Other attempts have been the simplistic application of notes to syllables and the subsequent stringing of those beats together in a pattern. A far too common musical interpretation insisted that stressed syllables get one beat and unstressed syllables a half beat, thus implying a strict temporality that, musically or poetically, results in rhythmic chaos.

Yet to develop a jazz prosody, we too must propose a general formula for applying stress to a syllable, and for indicating the distance between it and the next. These too will have their exceptions, for the improvisational and loosely structured form will allow many independent variations. In a jazz prosody, prime monosyllabic words receive a stressed pulse and a silent pulse before the next syllable. Secondary monosyllabic words receive an unstressed pulse and do not merit an adjoining silent pulse. (The difference between what constitutes a primary from secondary monosyllabic word is similar to that put forth by Attridge, which distills down to the word’s importance as a bearer of information. However, this distinction is ultimately subjective.) Polysyllabic words give each syllable a sounded pulse, with one stressed pulse within the word that does not merit an adjoining silent pulse. Though some amount of intermediate stress may be evident, they do not meet our binary requirements, and thus all polysyllabic words generally receive one stressed pulse.

There are other factors weighing on the implementation of a percussive scansion. When determining where to begin the meter, or where to ascribe the first stressed syllable of a poem or stanza, there are frequently one to three unstressed syllables that precede the first beat of the first full measure of the song. These “pick-up” notes, as they are termed by musicians, are not unlike the appearance of the eleventh syllable in a line of iambic pentameter. For the poet, to split the word confuses the reader and could suggest a deliberate line break where one does not exist; for the musician, it can fundamentally change the feeling of syncopation or synchronicity. Also subject to interpretation is the total number of stresses in a poetic line. Sometimes the musical abstraction of the poem derived from a percussive scansion can help to determine a preferable number of stresses as suggested by the rhythm or form of the poem. But as we shall see in our analysis of the works of Langston Hughes, all these rules must be kept “in the head” and are subject to a great deal of variation and interpretation.

There are also similarities in form between jazz music and poetry. From the traditional twelve-bar blues to the more freewheeling improvisations of bebop, the structure of poetic lines and stanzas frequently coincides with their musical counterparts, the chords and the chord progression. Yet while there are specific traditions for each subgenre of jazz, there exist wide variations within each category. The reason for the variety lies in the improvisation that is so much a part of the jazz tradition. These parallels are important because they transcend the mathematical precision of music and poetry; they take our analogues of pulse, form and rhythm to a more aesthetic level.

Much as we have the three levels of quantitative structure-pulse, meter and rhythm-we now turn to the three levels of qualitative structure. Unfortunately, the terminology here cannot be common to both arts, for it is at this point that we separate form from function, scientific from aesthetic. The root of the jazz aesthetic lies in the improvisation inherent in all jazz traditions. Musically, improvisation can work at the level of the note, phrase, or song; poetically, it works on the level of the word, line, and poem. On the primary level, jazz notes, while the same as other tones, were imposed on each other in new ways, forming more complex chords, and pushing the expectations of which notes belonged in which chord. In poetry, this boundary testing came in the form of language, the idioms, dialect, and lexicon of the jazz age. The secondary level offers music the melodic phrase, which is placed over a sequence of chords. In jazz, this chord sequence is generally dictated by the form of the piece, but can change if a suitable melody is found. Poetically the unit of the line is the device that arranges the words in a rhythmic and semantic way. The ordering of words and the breaking of lines provide the dominant being of the work, just as melody provides the being of the song. Improvisation in both song and poem are expected, and in many cases mandated, by the form of the piece. On the tertiary level, improvisation works on music at the level of song structure. Although there are standard rules for song structure, the tendency of musicians to improvise through the structure led to the very boundary-testing that made possible the evolution of jazz styles, from blues to boogie to bop. There are similar effects in the tertiary poetic level, where the sheer variety of typography, style, and content of jazz poems indicates the poet’s freedom to improvise as well.

The improvisational aesthetic not only loosened the rules of what was already a loose genre, but also encouraged experimentation and evolution. It encouraged the jazz solo, a staple of jazz music in which the melody stops and a solo instrumentalist experiments with a melody of his own that both echoes and alters the original melody. Jazz poets enjoyed the same benefits. Free verse had already altered the definition of poetry, and jazz poets felt compelled to alter it even further. One way they did so was through the rhythmic capabilities expanded by jazz music.

Prosody of Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was arguably the first poet to bring the rhythms of jazz to poetry, despite the attempts of earlier poets like Hart Crane and Carl Sandburg who reference jazz music in their work without using jazz forms or rhythms. Scholar Onwuchekwa Jemie believes Hughes’s work represents a contribution to the effort in the early part of the twentieth century to free poetry “from the stiff conventions which Anglo-Saxon prosody inflicted upon it. His particular achievement as a prosodist (is) he succeeded in bringing into the overall poetic arena, away from the locus of sideshows, such forms as the jazz poem, the blues poem, the sermon, the gospel shout, the exhortatory call-and-response of black theatre” (196). Though Jemie seems to equate prosody with form alone, Hughes also introduced the jazz rhythms that are integral to the sound of jazz poetry.

Although many of Hughes’s poems are rhythmically common, stanzaic, abab rhymes, his poetic repertoire spans three dominant phases in the jazz tradition: the blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop, or bop. Each of these musical genres has specific forms and rhythmic conventions that can be simulated in a poetic context. Like no other poet, Hughes brings all these prosodic devices together in his work. Jemie also argues for “keeping it in the head,” stating that to fully appreciate Hughes’s work, a reader must be informed. In one instance he writes that some of Hughes’s achievements are lost in the poetry unless the reader “bring to them an active memory of the blues singer’s stage presence” including the mannerisms and voice of the singer and the laughter and shouts of the audience (45). In order for the poetry to function prosodically, the reader must understand the expectations of the form, yet one need not be a jazz aficionado to bring some understanding to the reading. Knowing even the barest amount about the blues, for example, can go far towards indicating an informed reading. The blues are not fast, and they subscribe to the swung meter. Just these two basic facts, one inferred from the name of the style and one from an acquaintance with jazz in general, are enough to get by.

Much has been written about how these three jazz traditions, blues, boogie, and bop, serve as a metaphor for the feelings of African-Americans throughout the 1900s as they attempted to become more fully integrated into the white cultural fabric. As we will see, the rhythms of jazz were more than metaphorically the rhythms of life. The poetry of jazz uses these rhythms to convey a certain energy to the poetry. If we are to draw parallels between the rhythms of jazz music and Hughes’s jazz poetry, we must understand the musical differences in the form. Since the blues is arguably the root of all subsequent jazz music, it provides a good point from which to embark on a study.

The Blues

Musically, a pure blues progression consists of twelve four-beat measures, subdivided into three phrases of four measures each. The first phrase consists of sixteen beats: four beats of the tonic chord, followed by four beats of the dominant chord, and resolving with eight beats of the tonic. This phrase repeats a second time, providing the fifth through eighth measures of the progression. The third phrase begins on the dominant for four beats, diminishes to a sub-dominant, passing chord for four beats, and culminates in eight beats on the tonic to end the phrase and complete the twelve measure progression. A blues poetic stanza also consists of three phrases, of long, rhyming lines, each of which are typically divided for typographic convenience into two short lines, which we will call a line pair. As in music, the first and second line pair are nearly identical, expressing the same semantic thought, yet commonly differing by the omission of a word or addition of an extra modifier into the sentence. This slight alteration is called “worrying the line,” a technique that introduces rhythmic variety into the second line, even though the semantic meaning is usually the same. The third pair of lines concludes the blues phrase and is often a semantic antithesis or resolution of the first two pair.

Beneath this surface comparison, there are other claims that can be made about a blues rhythm. When performed as a song, the lyric is typically concentrated on the first two measures of each phrase, the second two measures are usually filled by an instrumental solo, or improvisational re-expression of the lyric’s melody. Within these first two measures, the lyric is frequently imposed on the music in two segments, the first taking three strong beats, followed by a pause of three strong beats, and the second coming on beats seven, eight and nine. (The ninth beat, though beyond the two measures, does coincide importantly with the chord resolution on the first beat of the third measure. This importance is occasionally heightened later in the stanza by the appearance of rhyme.)

Within these parameters lie a plethora of rhythmic variations made available by the triple meter. There exists the possibility of from one to three “pick-up” pulses that can precede the first beat of each musical phrase. There is the performative challenge of the long pauses that occur on the third and fourth measure of each musical phrase, during which the instrumentalist may improvise. A reader or speaker of a jazz poem would naturally pause at the end of each line pair-indeed at the end of each line itself-but a silence identical to two lines being read would certainly appear too long. There is also a tendency to end the phrase on a stressed syllable, and the words themselves often lend phonetic weight to satisfy that need.

As discussed above, the blues feature an underlying triple meter and a relatively slow tempo, and as such, they allow a wide variety of possible syllables per line. A musical blues phrase contains 16 beats, nine of which are typically available for singing; the remaining seven are instrumental only. Of the nine available, the middle three are generally silent, separating the first clause from the second, which leaves us with six. In each of the six, sung beats, there can exist from one to three pulses, which permits a syllable count of six to eighteen. There may also be one or two pick-up pulses before the first stressed beat of the line, bringing the total to as high as twenty. This sort of flexibility allows the poet to produce one line of six syllables and another of 20 while still remaining within the rhythmic confines of the form. Rarely, however, does Hughes stick to a strict blues form in his poems. Sometimes he will omit the second phrase altogether, sometimes he will incorporate a blues phrase into a poem of an entirely different form, but when he does so, the blues feel is still unmistakable.

Besides being a prolific poet, Hughes also wrote a children’s book on jazz music in which he describes his interpretations of both the history and the forms of jazz music. On the blues he writes, “…there were croons, work songs, and field hollers-a kind of musical cry-whose melodies had a blues sound. The blues are almost always a sad song. (but) behind the sadness, there is almost always laughter and strength” (First Book of Jazz 18-19). On a more subtle level, Hughes alters the common themes of love-lost, loneliness, and hunger, and turns them into fervent pleas for racial equality.

Though “The Weary Blues” may be Hughes’s best-known poem, it is more a poem about the blues form than a poem composed in the blues form. Still, when the blues singer croons his song, the result is a standard blues stanza. (The full text of all poems quoted in this essay begins on page 32.)

“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
            And can’t be satisfied-
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”

The poetic form subscribes to the generalities above in that the first and second pair carry the same semantic meaning but “worry” the structure by implying the subject rather than stating it. The third pair serve as the resolution of the singer’s thought. The pulse is slow and the meter is the standard swung 1-3. We know that each pair ideally consists of six stressed syllables that correspond to the six sung beats of the musical form, yet the specifics of stressed and unstressed pulses are only clearly evident in the second pair. The additional syllables in the first and third pair make the choice far less obvious. As a polysyllabic word, Weary gets a stress on its first syllable, as does the monosyllabic Blues for its semantic importance. Three monosyllabic words remain, of which we cannot stress the article the, and so must decide between I and got, of which I would normally be the most important component. However, in this case I must serve as a pick-up pulse, occurring as it does at the beginning of the line, so got does receive a stress falling on the first beat of the musical measure.

A similar problem exists in the third pair. A first reading might be pure dactylic trimeter, but this would violate the blues tendency to stress the last syllable of the line. If we assign stress to mo’ and also assign stress to the first syllable of happy as a polysyllabic word, then we are left with one stress to deploy on either I, ain’t or no. Preference here is given to the verb providing the action. The last line yields seven monosyllables, of which wish, I, and died receive emphasis. The resulting percussive scansion would look like this.

While this particular segment of “The Weary Blues” is in agreement with the blues construction, the rest of the poem, while flirting with it, does not provide a perfect analogue. Many other Hughes blues poems consist solely of blues stanzas as constructed above, and our blues prosody would align with them in the poem’s entirety. Poems like “Midwinter Blues,” “Gypsy Man,” “Ma Man,” “Listen Here Blues,” “Fortune Teller Blues,” and others provide perfect examples of the blues poetics on which to impose a scansion, yet “The Weary Blues” additionally gives the reader information he or she might need to better identify the feel of those more rhythmically generic poems.

“The Weary Blues” provides an abundance of visual imagery to assist in our conceptualizing the blues poem and blues form, but it also indicates something of tempo and feel. The tempo is “drowsy,” but the feel is “syncopated,” not synchronous. The tempo is slow enough to permit “rocking back and forth” and a lazy “swaying to and fro,” and when he sings, it is in a “deep song voice with a melancholy tone.” The imagery Hughes gives us is of a “Negro” playing a “sad raggy tune” on a “poor piano,” sitting on his “rickety stool” and thumping his foot on the floor. The language serves a more than semantic purpose in the poem, providing both indications of tempo as well as the imagery that provide a context for the reading. Still, “The Weary Blues” is more than just a song or a musical style. The poem has its roots in the “black man’s soul” delivered with a “moan.” His crooning “far into the night” is indicative of the struggle of his race, and it may be until “the stars go out and so does the moon” before the struggle is over. For the time being, the only relief is to sleep “like a rock or a man that’s dead.” It is the weariness of the people that gives the blues its slow, melancholy feel.

Hughes’s poem “Ma Man” offers a purer blues form for examination, and highlights the flexibility of assigning syllables in a jazz poem. The second stanza of the poem, scanned below, illustrates this flexibility and some of the adjustments that must be made to conform to the blues aesthetic. The first line pair contains 13 syllables, the same as in “The Weary Blues.” The second line pair worries the first, but Hughes’s insertion of ellipses between the second and third plunk appear to suggest a longer pause, which has been inserted into this scansion. Into the last half of the third line pair, “The Weary Blues” places seven syllables, while the same section of “Ma Man” accommodates ten, provided they run together syncopatively as scanned below. The other stanzas of this poem offer similar complexities, and it is one of the most difficult to which a blues prosody can be applied.

Boogie Woogie

Boogie-woogie builds upon the blues structure and swung rhythm, but alters it in two important ways. Hughes writes, “‘Trilling the treble and rolling the bass’ is the way some players describe ‘boogie-woogie’. One hand makes the piano a talking drum. The other hand makes it a singing voice” (First Book of Jazz 27). A restating of this is that in this one instrument, one hand maintains the pulse and meter while the other uses melody to indicate the rhythm of the piece. Music scholars Nanry and Berger concur: “Typically employing a twelve-bar structure…boogie-woogie relied on a persistent percussive (repeated) bass figure in the left hand. In the right hand, interesting cross rhythms and melodic invention struggled against the steady pulse of the left” (76). Another characteristic difference between boogie and blues is the tempo of the music, in which boogie is played about twice as fast as a traditional blues, from 80 beats per minute in the blues (think of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”) to 160 beats per minute in the boogie (think of The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”). This doubling of the tempo, combined with the “rolling” of the bass, serves to produce a sort of rumbling sound, which changed the drowsy, lazy sway of the blues into the happy beat of boogie.

Rhythmically, the triple pulse that underlies blues still exists, but the increased tempo further deemphasizes the triple pulse and forces the meter to rely solely on the first and third pulse, which also serves to heighten the swung feel of the poem. The poet’s flexibility is also reduced by this near disappearance of the second pulse, since the appearance of three syllables in a row without a silent pulse would result in a virtually unprounceable line. A boogie rhythm is sometimes applied to a blues form, generating a twelve-measure progression or a stanza of three line pairs, but the increased dominance of the bass and the faster tempo increased the popularity of the four-bar phrase as the segment of baseline measure. This results in a four-line poetic stanza. The staccato units and sharp though predictable rhythms still make optional a slight pause at the end of the first, second, and fourth lines, with the third line typically running directly into the fourth. Most poems in a pure boogie form call for a rhythmically specific performance that attains an almost chant-like quality and precision.

One of the most natural boogie poems for study is Hughes’s “Dream Boogie” from his 1951 collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. Feinstein writes that the collection “pulses with the blues, boogie-woogie, brief riffs and longer solos,” and that “Dream Boogie” asks the reader “to listen with greater sensitivity to jazz, to hear what is beneath the beat-the dream deferred” (Feinstein 106). This change from blues to boogie signifies a much larger cultural shift, as African-Americans left the acquiescence of the blues behind for the political and cultural rumble of the boogie.

As in “The Weary Blues,” Hughes shares a little about the prosody of “Dream Boogie” through the imagery associated with its topic, in this case the cynicism of a father about his child’s facetious, jazz-age optimism. The “boogie-woogie rumble” is indicative of a bass part that provides a consistent, rapid “happy beat.” Hughes ends the poem with a common scat phrase, which in its standard rhythm provides a clue as to the tempo and rhythm of the poem. Hughes also begins to experiment with the orthography of poetry by using italics to indicate the father’s response to his child. In the second stanza, the father attempts to complete the rhyme, while in the third, he again asks his son to determine whether the beat is happy or not. The son responds in the fourth stanza by answering in the affirmative and chanting the scat phrase to conclude the poem. Hughes uses the boogie form to suggest that even though the beat is happy, those for whom the dream has been deferred are beginning to rumble, but only for those who “listen closely.”

In “Saturday Night,” Hughes does not lexically indicate the boogie form in the title or the body of the poem; however, the brevity of the lines and the predominant four line grouping, though not stanzaic in the strict sense, are indicative of the boogie form. Interestingly, the fourth group, with its scat language in the first two lines, adds an additional phrase, which is further complicated by its break into four lines. Like the evolution of orthographic italics in “Dream Boogie,” this extra phrase begins to suggest the evolution of jazz beyond the common forms of the blues and boogie-woogie toward the free-form stylings of bebop. During this period of jazz musical history, white dance hall bands led by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey Brothers successfully appropriated the jazz sound, which was seen by many black musicians of the fifties as bastardizing their culture and eliminating their chance to reap the financial rewards of jazz music. “Saturday Night” conveys this feeling by encouraging a carpe diem approach to living in the jazz age, as much as to say that one should gamble, have sex, drink, and dance because life is short, and “you’s a long time/Dead/When you is/Dead, too.” The last group of the poem tells people to have fun “Till de red dawn come,” and while the phrase suggests partying until morning, its allusion to the coming of communism, which will provide long-awaited equality and reason for living, is quite clear.

Bebop

Hughes terms bebop a “saucy, more offbeat than ever kind of jazz,” in which “clashing chords and dissonances may be more prominent than in older forms of jazz” (First Book of Jazz 55). As with the evolution from blues to boogie, the tempo again increases to a frenetic 240 beats per minute, though there are many more deviations from this normative tempo than exist in blues or boogie-woogie. One side effect of this increased speed is the complete loss of metrical clarity. In the blues or boogie, the musical beats were clearly marked by the drums; in bop, the drums left the time-keeping to the string bass and began to play rhythms that emphasized syncopation rather than maintaining the metric similarities. This disappearance of meter shifts the emphasis to the overall rhythm of the piece, and since there is not a dominant meter in which to ground the rhythm, much more of the prosody is open to interpretation. The pulse also changes-gone is the silent 2 of the blues triple meter, and since the tempo is so rapid, the 1 and 3 are closer together than ever, resulting in almost an equidistance that strips the swing feel from the music entirely. Instead of the rumble of the bass in boogie, we now have steady pulses that occur on each musical beat. It is at this time that improvisation becomes primary to the music, and to the poetry as well.

Hughes implements this improvisational dictum in both orthographic and sonic ways. The use of italics to indicate a change of speaker and the expanding of phrases in the boogie form are now commonplace, as are suspect line breaks and the disappearance of a single, identifiable form altogether. The first part of Hughes’s sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred is entitled “Boogie segue to Bop,” and the poems in this collection are indicative of the change in music and black culture. Feinstein writes of the musical significance of this progression: “…for many musicians of the time who were yearning to break from the traditional harmonics and meter of dance band jazz, but who had no established vocabulary as of yet, bebop liberated their hearing and their thinking with profound and immediate effects” (91). Put another way, with the jazz age optimism of the boogie wearing thin, and with the success of white musicians in what was a black musical style, more radical forms of artistic expression were needed.

It is hard to discuss bebop rhythms without hearing them. Because the meter is so flexible, and the pulse so driving, the time it takes to establish a true rhythm is increased, often spanning across poetic stanzas or musical phrases that pulse unceasingly for ten minutes or more. It satisfies our rhythmic desire for control only by its inevitable repetition, and the only way to truly ascertain this rhythm is to become almost entranced by the pulse of the music. This free-form style took root in rhythm, as Feinstein notes, “The bebop rhythm section furthered the overall innovation by replacing the established on-the-beat background (in which the bass player often restated the drummer’s beat) with more-syncopated rhythms that did not abandon the beat but rather emphasized the other rhythms inherent within the overall rhythm of the tune” (92). The rhythm and progressions of the song are really just a framework around which the musician improvises, and because the time to consider exactly what will be played improvisationally is almost nonexistent, the result is a free-form, unplanned flurry of sound. This places a much greater emphasis on the performance and the manner in which the text is recited, rather than on its adherence to any specific form. In bop poetry, this results in an increased usage of typographic tools that have little, if any, musical connection. We will examine one such example of each prosodic tool, sound and typography, in the passages below.

In “Good Morning,” the last poem of the Montage, the opening line duplicates the first line of the “Dream Boogie.” This time, however, the father begins speaking immediately and without the italic convention of the earlier work. Recalling his birth sets up a reflective mood in stark contrast to the happy beat of “Good morning Daddy.” Hughes sets up several rhymes, only to discontinue them, deferring our expectation, perhaps, like a dream. Lines 2 and 4 rhyme, yet 6 does not; similarly the rhyming pairs of lines 7 and 8, 9 and 10 are not continued with the subsequent pairs. Lines 18 to 20, consisting of solely one word or word phrase, convey the pause of introspection associated with “wonder,” “wide-eyed,” and “dreaming.” Lines 24 and 25 are indented, as if to emphasize their contrast to the welcoming the new immigrants expected. A rhyme is used between line 22 and 25 to restate this point. After a blank line, Hughes poses the question asked earlier in the Montage. This time, however, it is the father who asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” The son responds in another echo of “Dream Boogie,” “Daddy, ain’t you heard?”

A percussive scansion of this poem would yield no definitive reading, yet using the principles that we have discussed in earlier portions of this essay, as bop composers used the foundations of the blues and boogie-woogie, we can posit one interpretation. While bop music is generally performed at a rapid tempo, the nostalgic nature of this poem would seem to counteract that tendency. The first line could be read identically to its reading in “Dream Boogie,” but beginning with the father’s voice in the second line, the pulse would certainly slow. The first three lines of the father’s speech are fairly regular, and the appearance of rhyme heightens that consistency. Line 6 forces nine syllables, which in order to maintain a regular tempo, would need to increase the pulse to a frequency that segues nicely into the two rhyming pairs which follow. From this point, it is a more frenetic, improvisational rhythm, and the disappearance of the rhyme serves to emphasize its rhythmic discontinuity. The pace continues until lines 18-20, which by their standing alone, force us to slow down the pace again to convey the spirit of reflection. The subsequent line’s use of the em dash and rhyme serves to maintain the slow, pulsing regularity. The last three lines of the poem are again echoes of lines found elsewhere in the sequence, only this time, the son’s response must be one of sorrow at his father’s naïveté, not the happy beat of the same question of “Dream Boogie.”

The following percussive scansion was produced in a uniquely electronic way. The poem was read aloud, at which time a drumstick was struck on an electronic pad that recorded the rhythm into a computer. Unlike other recordings, the data was not entered in any specific tempo, the notes were allowed to fall wherever the drummer placed them. When finished, the resulting scansion was quantized, which takes notes that may fall between pulses and shifts them to one pulse or another using a preestablished setting. The resulting data was then parsed into musical notation and the poetry added. Unlike the other examples in this essay that impose a poetic reading on a representative musical form, this example applies a musical form to a poetic reading. The resulting scansion, though musically complex, is an entirely accurate depiction of one reading of the poem. The scansion supports some of the general claims made above, including the pauses between lines 18-20, and the similar rhythmic notation for rhyming phrases like “out of Penn Station” and “tenth of a nation.” The opening line appears as notated in “Dream Boogie” while the closing line, also from “Dream Boogie,” is this time represented by a halting, more introspective reading.

Hughes’s “The Cat and the Saxophone” provides an orthographic example of a jazz prosody, and although this poem precedes the bop era, it does foreshadow the technique Hughes utilizes in much of Ask Your Mama, his most integrated work of jazz poetry and music. (Since Hughes specifies a musical accompaniment to this work, it has not been analyzed in this essay.) The use of all capital letters in the lines is at first seemingly random; however a closer analysis, and the mention of “Charleston” at the end, require us to rethink their use. The Charleston beat was well-known and performed to accommodate a certain dance step, and as such, there is little room for alternative rhythmic interpretations. The capitalized lines are indeed lyrics to a verse of a Charleston song, which is performed like this:

The interjection of the other lines seems to indicate a discussion between a man and woman at the bar, while the song plays in the background. It could be that Hughes was trying to indicate their simultaneous performance, but he did not choose to write them alongside each other, or even to use other typographic means, like indentation, to indicate their synchronicity. Instead, this orthography would seem to indicate a pause at the end of each capitalized phrase to allow the couple to have their discussion. The couple’s discussion is not rhythmically regular, and in fact, is broken by the capitalized lines not only between speakers but also within the comment of one speaker. In this way, the poem evidences a split poetic personality, with one half demanding a rhythmic, musically inspired reading, and another refuting such a reading. A scansion of this poem might specify the lines that are meant to be rhythmically regular, while also allowing the other lines to be performed without the constraints of meter. The result might be something like this:

As stated earlier, a jazz prosody and a percussive scansion constitute one method of interpreting a jazz poem, particularly as it implies a certain performance. This prosody relies on an understanding of the layering of rhythm atop meter atop pulse brought together with keeping the atmosphere of the music “in the head.” There have been few other attempts at a jazz prosody, and while all are well-presented, they tend to ignore the concept of rhythm that I believe is so fundamental to prosody in general and to jazz in particular. Charles O. Hartman’s work on the prosody of free verse, and his experience as a musician, would lead one to expect great things from his book, Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song. Disappointingly, Hartman’s work in this book focuses on the aspect of poetic and musical voice within an improvisational context and virtually ignores all talk of a jazz prosody at all. (By my count, the word prosody appears only twice). The work is useful in understanding some of the formulaic similarities between poetry and music, but falls short of examining a prosody that would seem to connect them.

Likewise, Meta Du Ewa Jones’s essay, “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality” is more focused on the orthographic representation of sound, particularly the way in which poets use typography and phonetics to indicate a specific jazz sound reminiscent of a particular jazz artist or instrument. No attempt is made to discuss the rhythm of the poetry itself, and as Hartman focuses on the sound of voice, Jones focuses on the textual representation of the voice.

While this essay does attempt to show the manner by which the rhythms of jazz poetry have been infused by jazz music, there is still much work to be done. Certainly the work of Langston Hughes provides a broad spectrum of form within which to examine the prosody of jazz, yet there is no one true prosody that will apply to all jazz poetry, much as there is no one true type of jazz. The very nature of the jazz aesthetic encourages improvisation and innovation, and the work of the critic trying to find abstractions common to both art forms is beset with the very problems which prosody itself tries to resolve. As such, there can be no one, true reading of a jazz poem, but by examining jazz poetry through the form and expectations of the music that inspires it, many similarities are seen. Though musical approaches to prosody may have been fraught with errors in the past, jazz poetry is well-integrated with its musical counterpart, and the music of jazz can tell the prosodist a great deal about the music of words.

Works Cited

Dickson, L. L. “‘Keep it in the Head’: Jazz Elements in Modern Black American Poetry.” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 10.1 (1983): 29-37.

Feinstein, Sascha. Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1997.

Hart, Howard. Selected Poems: Six Sets, 1951-1983. Berkeley, Calif: City Miner, 1984.

Hartman, Charles O. Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Eds. Rampersad, Arnold and David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Hughes, Langston. The First Book of Jazz. New York: Franklin Watts, 1955.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1976.

Jones, Meta Du Ewa. “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 66-91.

Nanry, Charles with Edward Berger. The Jazz Text. New York: Van Nostrand, 1979.

Full Text of Poems Discussed

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
        I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
        He did a lazy sway….
        He did a lazy sway….
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
        O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
        Sweet Blues!
Corning from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-
        “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
        Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
        I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
        And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more-
        “I got the Weary Blues
        And I can’t be satisfied.
        Got the Weary Blues
        And can’t be satisfied-
        I ain’t happy no mo’
        And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Ma Man

When ma man looks at me
He knocks me off ma feet.
When ma man looks at me
He knocks me off ma feet.
He’s got those ‘lectric-shockin’ eyes an’
De way he shocks me sho is sweet.

He kin play a banjo.
Lordy, he kin plunk, plunk, plunk.
He kin play a banjo.
I mean plunk, plunk. . . plunk, plunk.
He plays good when he’s sober
An’ better, better, better when he’s drunk.

Eagle-rockin’,
Daddy, eagle-rock with me.
Eagle rockin’,
Come an’ eagle-rock with me.
Honey baby,
Eagle-rockish as I kin be!

Dream Boogie

Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a-
        You think
        It’s a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath like a-
        What did I say?

Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
        Hey, pop!
        Re-bop!
        Mop!
        Y-e-a-h!

Saturday Night

Play it once.
O, play some more.
Charlie is a gambler
An’ Sadie is a whore.
        A glass o’ whiskey
        An’ a glass o’ gin:
        Strut, Mr. Charlie,
        Till de dawn comes in.
Pawn yo’ gold watch
An’ diamond ring.
Git a quart o’ licker,
Let’s shake dat thing!
        Skee-de-dad! De-dad!
        Doo-doo-doo!
        Won’t be nothin’ left
        When de worms git through
        An’ you’s a long time
        Dead
        When you is
        Dead, too.
So beat dat drum, boy!
Shout dat song:
Shake ‘em up an’ shake ‘em up
All night long.
        Hey! Hey!
        Ho… Hum!
        Do it, Mr. Charlie,
        Till de red dawn come.

Good Morning

Good morning, daddy!
I was born here, he said,
watched Harlem grow
until colored folks spread
from river to river
across the middle of Manhattan
out of Penn Station
dark tenth of a nation,
planes from Puerto Rico,
and holds of boats, chico,
up from Cuba Haiti Jamaica,
in buses marked New York
from Georgia Florida Louisiana
to Harlem Brooklyn the Bronx
but most of all to Harlem
dusky sash across Manhattan
I’ve seen them come dark
        wondering
        wide-eyed
        dreaming
out of Penn Station-
but the trains are late.
The gates open-
                Yet there’re bars
                at each gate.

                        What happens
                        to a dream deferred?

                Daddy, ain’t you heard?

The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)

EVERYBODY
Half-pint, -
Gin?
No, make it
LOVES MY BABY
corn. You like
liquor,
don’t you, honey?
BUT MY BABY
Sure. Kiss me,
DON’T LOVE NOBODY
daddy.
BUT ME.
Say!
EVERYBODY
Yes?
WANTS MY BABY
I’m your
BUT MY BABY
sweetie, ain’t I?
DON’T WANT NOBODY
Sure.
BUT
Then let’s
ME,
do it!
SWEET ME.
Charleston, mamma!
!

Moby-Dick is a fascinating puzzle of textual scholarship and bibliography. Edited by Melville under the extenuating circumstances of poor eyesight, the oppressive heat of a New York City summer, and a quickly mounting personal debt, Melville strove to complete a work that had already frustrated, beguiled, and consumed him for the better part of two years. Although other writerly psychoses, like missed deadlines and relentless pursuit of perfection, may have been the main reason for much of the textual errata that was born into the American and British first editions, this study is less concerned with the inadvertent changes than with the intentional ones. These edits, conducted by someone at Melville’s British publisher, were likely performed without Melville’s knowledge or approval, and their nature can be broadly characterized into edits of style, idiom, and decency. Stylistic edits include the correction of erroneous sources and the standardization and correction of accidentals, like punctuation and misspelling. Idiomatic edits include the softening of Melville’s aggressive language, changes in spelling to account for differences in American and British English, and changes to words not part of the British lexicon. While some of the stylistic and idiomatic edits were most certainly introduced by Melville’s handwritten comments on the typed proof sheets, the decency edits are not among them. These edits are the most interesting and telling, as they account for offenses against religion, propriety and nationality which were removed presumably to placate proper (and prosperous) Victorian readers and consumers of British novels.

Regrettably, little conclusive information exists about the criteria the editor used and even whether or not Melville knew he was being censored. Of immense help in analysis of the two first editions is the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, compiled by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker and published in 1967. It includes an authoritative version of the novel and a detailed list of all substantive variations, emendations, and accidentals in the text. Furthermore, in the novel’s 150-year critical history, much bibliographic data has been entered and analyses made between both editions, but before we examine the differences it would be wise to restate the circumstances of both the composition of Moby-Dick and the British publication of Melville’s prior works.

History of Composition

Melville began planning and writing Moby-Dick in early 1850 and by his own admission was half finished with the book in May of that year (Melville 551). He was confident enough in his progress to write a letter in June to his British publisher Richard Bentley, offering terms for publication of the work and declaring its readiness by late autumn; however, it would be another full year before Melville wrote Bentley again about the novel, offering him contractual terms and promising to send the American proof sheets in August 1851 (552; 562). During this one-year period, Melville spent a great deal of time rewriting his “whale.” Most scholars attribute this decision to events in the summer of 1850 that greatly affected the scope and purpose of his novel, which had changed in essence from a whaling romance to a whaling epic, from a novel of adventure to an allegory of man. Among these influential events were Melville’s careful reading of works by Carlyle and Shakespeare in the July of 1850, and a now famous gathering of American literati in August of 1850, which yielded Melville’s famous essay on the value and purpose of American literature, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (Giles 232). 

In his new vision, Melville set out to produce a work of literature that would be archetypically American, yet this intent would by definition yield a work that was the antithesis of period British literature. Melville and earlier American adventure writers had always displayed a gruff style that came to be recognized as “American.” With its tendencies towards adventure, realism, non-elevated language, and working class audience, the American style differed greatly from its Victorian counterpart, which focused on sweeping epics of the aristocracy, novels of middle-class manners, and tales of bucolic leisure. But in Moby-Dick, Melville sought to define an American literature through more than idiom and lexicon. He sought to use British literary conventions in a parodic way, to expose what he may have seen as flaws in the British imperialist society, or in British literature for that matter. One example of this is his utilization of humor and unreliable narrators. In an essay outlining Melville’s relationship with British readers during and after his lifetime, Paul Giles writes that Melville, like Carlyle, chose “playfully to balance their neoplatonic idealism against the voices of imperfect narrators, narrators who can act for the reader as conduits between familiar everyday circumstances and the more abstract regions of metaphysics” (233). Giles also recasts D.H. Lawrence’s belief that Melville’s skill lies in “traducing established conventions from English literature and culture by sliding them rhetorically into new, parodic forms” (233). One example he provides is the way in which Ishmael mocks the upper crust style of the English Victorian novel when, while scrubbing the deck, the Pequod crew “‘humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets and fine cambrics’…as though they might be in a novel by Anthony Trollope or George Eliot” (234). Melville’s style and subject matter not only kept his work in relative obscurity in his lifetime, but made it more difficult for subsequent generations of British critics to accept the “profane implications of Melville’s aggressive irreverence” (Giles 226). This irreverence was essential to the American style, and in 1851 it most certainly caused great alarm to his British publisher.

Melville’s change of direction in the writing of the novel caused a number of practical problems, not the least of which was financial debt. Coming to realize that the novel must be completed, whole sections of the novel were rushed from manuscript to typescript even before related sections of the work were completed. He was so far behind in the composition, that he left much of the typescript proofreading to his wife and a few others who, because of their unfamiliarity with the work, introduced more errors into the typescript. According to Hayford and Parker:

By late July 1851…Melville was passing the “closing sheets” of his book through the [American] press, but the proofs were not mailed to England until September 10. This interval gave Melville several weeks to spend making final revisions on the proofs. Since he knew the book would be completely reset for the English edition, Melville was free to make whatever corrections and revisions he wanted and had time to make. He was not equally free to make revisions for the American edition, since the book was already plated and he would have to pay for any changes himself (475).

In brief, Melville made corrections on the American proof sheets, which he then sent to England to be recomposited for publication there. It is because of this process that many discrepancies arose between the two editions, and although the study of these differences is a fascinating exercise, the concerns of this essay are changes not apparently made by Melville himself, but by his British publisher, Richard Bentley.

New York/London Publication

Lynn Horth’s informative essay on Bentley sheds light on Melville’s reputation in British literary circles, on Bentley and Melville’s professional relationship, and also provides a hypothesis on who may have edited The Whale, as it was then called. Melville’s first interaction with Bentley came after Joseph Murray, publisher of Typee and Omoo, rejected publication of Mardi in 1849. Before accepting Mardi, Bentley solicited and received a report on the book, which, though unsigned, Horth attributes quite conclusively to Martha Jones, a frequent reviewer of literature for varied British periodicals including Bentley’s own magazine. Jones’ felt that Melville’s Mardi “intend(s) a ridicule or rather denunciation of all established forms…of religion… and is discoursed of in a way to offend Christians of all denominations” (qtd. in Horth 231). In addition, Melville’s writing “could almost seem to have been written by a madman,-and the last few pages are quite delirious” (qtd. in Horth 231). Horth believes Jones’ reports “emphasize her awareness that such market considerations as a good plot and an unoffensive treatment of religion were among the key concerns at the Bentley firm” (230).

Horth further notes that while Bentley “published not a single one of the books [Jones] censured in her ten other reports still in the Bentley papers at the British Library,” he accepted Mardi despite her misgivings, most likely out of desire to have Melville as one of his authors (233). Bentley paid the full amount of Melville’s requested advance, and in a presumed, though unlocated letter, Horth believes Bentley “agreed …to accept Mardi without altering the text in any way, since this was one of the stipulations Melville had made when offering the book first to John Murray” (234).

While the reviews for Mardi were mixed, each ensuing book was greeted with less and less enthusiasm. Upon agreeing to publish Melville’s next book, Redburn, Bentley offered only two-thirds of Melville’s requested advance. The contract for Melville’s next book, White-Jacket, included a clause that Melville would reimburse Bentley for any financial losses. In neither instance is there evidence that Bentley requested expurgation of Melville’s work for British audiences, and the British and American editions of Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket are nearly identical (Horth 243). It is remarkable that after three consecutive financial losses Bentley still agreed to publish The Whale, offering two-thirds of Melville’s requested advance, yet retaining an avaricious half of the book’s profits (Melville 562). Only after The Whale was published, while offering terms for Melville’s next book, Pierre, did Bentley demand Melville allow Bentley’s “judicious literary friend” to edit the book for British publication. Thus, if evidence indicates Bentley did not expurgate Melville in novels prior to The Whale, and yet insisted on expurgation after The Whale, I suggest Melville did not agree for The Whale to be expurgated in the first place. In this case, we can surmise that many of the British changes, whether in the name of clarity or good taste, were performed without Melville’s authorization. There are no surviving documents to confirm or deny this assumption or to indicate which changes are in fact Melville’s, yet physical evidence reveals that changes and expurgations were made, and it might be that Martha Jones, advisor of Richard Bentley and reviewer of Mardi, was the one responsible for those edits.

In Bentley’s letter of acceptance to publish Pierre only with significant alterations, he writes:

…if you had not sometimes offended the feelings of many sensitive readers you would have succeeded in England. Everybody must admit the genius displayed in your writings; but it would have been impossible for any publisher with any prudent regard to his own interests to have put out your books here without revisal, & occasional omission (qtd. in Horth 238).

Bentley’s use of the past conditional tense “would have been impossible” seems to suggest this letter is not only a proposal for expurgation of Pierre, but also a defense of the “revisal and occasional omission” he ordered for The Whale.

In a letter to an American acquaintance written February 22, 1850, after the publication of White-Jacket, but before the acceptance of The Whale, Bentley writes, “if only [Melville] be careful not to rub too violently against general opinion in religious matters, he cannot fail to be very popular” (qtd. in Horth 239). Even at this late stage, Bentley still recognized Melville’s talent, and yet his recognition of Melville’s liabilities perhaps forced Bentley to only accept The Whale if it could be so altered. As stated earlier there is nothing to suggest that Melville agreed to the expurgation of The Whale, though his precarious financial situation and his need to get the British book in copyright before publication of the American edition may have forced him to give in to Bentley’s request, if there indeed was one. Whether Melville agreed to be expurgated, or whether he authorized any of the changes is irrelevant; what matters is that changes were made, and in great number.

Edits of Style and Idiom

Michael Sadiler’s 1922 comparison of the two editions, found “approximately 150 omissions or changes of less than a sentence in length” including “thirty-five omissions of a whole sentence or more” (Ament 41). Not included in this number are the deletions of a Melville footnote, the complete removal of Chapter 35, and the absent epilogue, which Melville added before the American version went to press, but after the proof sheets of the American had been sent off to Britain for compositing. The title of the book suffered a similar fate; being changed to Moby-Dick after the sheets had been mailed.

Many scholars believe that some changes made to the British edition are improvements, particularly those which standardized Melville’s erratic punctuation, and those which removed words where Melville had originally substituted one for another and yet both ended up in print. Either way, Harrison and Hayford note, “Isolating all [Melville's] corrections of accidentals is hopeless, although there are frequent instances where the English punctuation make noticeably better sense…With substantive changes-changes of words-we can be much surer when it was Melville himself who made a given change and when it was not” (476).

Stylistic edits include the correction of erroneous source material and the standardization and correction of accidentals (errors in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), in which there are over 100 differences between the editions, most of them minor changes executed in the interest of clarity. Of the seventeen changes in comma punctuation alone, one favorable, oft-cited example is the correction of the American edition’s, “D’ye feel brave men, brave?” which the British edition corrects with a comma: “D’ye feel brave, men, brave?” (459). Another more impacting change exists in Ahab’s dialogue with Starbuck about abandoning the quest for the safety of home. In the American edition Ahab writes, “What is it…recklessly making me ready to do what…I durst not so much as dare. Is Ahab Ahab? Is it I, God or who that lifts the arm?” (444-445). The American reading conveys Ahab’s doubtful introspection, much in the mode of a Shakespearean tragic protagonist, as if to utter, “Am I still myself?” The British text replaces the middle sentence with “Is it Ahab, Ahab?” This reading makes better sense when placed in context of the sentences preceding and following, in which he questions the source of his motivation as if to say, “Am I doing this or is someone making me do it?” In this instance, the comma and the insertion of the pronoun change the meaning of an entire paragraph in one of the novel’s most important passages of characterization. The beneficial or detrimental impact of that change divides many scholars.

The British edition also contains changes in incorrect references to source material, and in some cases to attributing the wrong character to a piece of dialog. Hayford and Parker suggest that these changes were in fact made by Melville on the American proof sheets used by the British, but not on sheets used by the American publisher (487). Examples include source attributions where the American edition mistakes John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for his Holy War, and the British martyr John Wickliff for martyr Thomas Cranmer (4; 140). Other examples change blatantly incorrect usages, such as referring to Peleg when Melville obviously meant Bildad and plaintiffs when he meant defendants (72; 333). In this case, whether the changes were Melville’s or the British editor’s, they are accurate and justified.

Forty-six changes were made in spelling between editions, which may be delineated between instances in which obvious misspellings or typos in the American edition were corrected, and instances in which the spelling was changed as a result of differing standards in American and British English. Some obvious misspellings and their British replacements are Cruize/Cruise, Bhreing’s/Behring’s, and Cogniac/Cognac (9; 65; 272). Idiomatic spelling changes from American to British include Merchant/Marchant, warrantry/warranty, smooth/smoothe and feign/fain (68; 109; 403; 425). These idiomatic spelling changes, though perhaps made in the name of clarity for the British reading public, also imply a discrimination against the American idiom, since the editor apparently felt that the British spelling was correct and the American version inferior, if not outright wrong. Certainly British readers would still have understood the American spelling and might have accepted it as an idiosyncrasy of American literature. Alternatively, the changes may have been made to protect the literary reputation of the publisher, since they might have been viewed as careless editorial mistakes rather than American idiomatic differences. (Contemporary international publishers continue to practice a reverse form of this discrimination. One need only examine the recent Harry Potter books to see how routinely the American publisher substitutes “color” for “colour” and “shop” for “shoppe.”)

Another type of idiomatic edit in The Whale concerns the softening of language, in which one begins to see changes that were more about Melville’s authorial voice than about a writer’s mechanics. Though some of the edits can be considered as expurgations, they are here not treated as such because they have little or nothing to do with censorship on religious, sexual, or ethnic grounds. While the ultimate goal of both is to soften the work, changes in idiom are not so much a deletion of offensive material as an alternation of tone, which well-heeled Victorian readers may have seen as gruff or presumptuous. A good example of this is when the American edition says, “the grand distinction,” while the British softens it to “one of the grand distinctions,” subtly yet effectively reducing the authority of the narrator (128). In similar examples, a “noble” custom becomes a more subdued “grand” custom, and “huge” is lessened to “large” (145; 5). Other idiomatic softening occurs when the editor reduces multi-adverbial or multi-adjectival phrases, apparently in the interest of brevity. For example, the American “consecutive great battles,” “however wistful and erring,” and “found grimly clinging” are shortened to the British “consecutive battles,” “however erring,” and “found clinging” (230; 443; 457). Whatever the editor’s justification for edits of this nature, they do seem specifically directed at Melville as an American author, as these types of phrases and Melville’s gruffness differ little from Walter Scott’s, and Melville’s verbosity and omniscient authority are not dissimilar from British novels of the Victorian period.

Cogent claims can be made that Melville made many of the changes to the British edition himself, since, as Ament points out above, he had several weeks to add markings to his American proof sheets before sending them Bentley. This would certainly explain the many accidentals; as for idiomatic changes, however, an argument can be made that Melville softening his own narrative to be more conformative to British standards would be counterproductive to his new theory of a distinctly American literature.

Expurgations and Edits of Decency

Regardless of the source of stylistic and idiomatic changes, there is little doubt that the major expurgations in the work were performed at Bentley’s request, and without Melville’s consent. These passages were presumably omitted for disrespect or irreverence of Judeo-Christian theology, impropriety of language, and offenses against national honor; however, a close analysis of the omitted content will bring to mind comparable passages that, when held to the same decency standards, were surprisingly allowed to remain in the British text, whether through editorial oversight or subjective acceptability. Some contradictions exist because the offended groups are non-Westerner and/or non-Christian, and thus not protected by the editor, but other passages are clearly in violation of British standards established elsewhere in the book. Comparing the omissions with the inclusions might then tell us more about the decency standards of British culture, or at least what the editor of The Whale (and the publisher’s marketing department) presumed those standards to be.

William S. Ament writes that in addition to accounting for matters of style and differences in the American and British idioms, Bentley’s copy-editor was free to “omit crude or blasphemous passages. He did not hesitate to rewrite whole sentences” (41). As discussed above, recent findings appear to indicate the “he” may have been a “she;” and while there exists no correspondence detailing the identity of whom Bentley calls his “judicious literary friend,” Martha Jones might have been the Bowdler of Moby-Dick. The changes that are suspect in this category are those which were instituted to adjust for perceived sensitivities in British culture and thus shield the reader from Melville’s disrespect of religion, propriety, and British national honor.

Religious edits include references to biblical figures when not used in a purely favorable way, as well as complete deletions if the passage contained references “too sacred to be mentioned or expatiated upon in a somewhat ironic whale story” (Ament 43). These edits were handled in two different ways, either by removing or altering the reference to the biblical figure, or by deleting the offending passage altogether. Examples of the former methodology include changing “poor Paul’s” to “St. Paul’s” and “old Jonah” to “old fellow” (19; 23). While these may seem not to greatly affect the style of the novel, there is a significant loss of descriptive power between the American description of Ahab “with a crucifixion in his face” and the British “with an apparently eternal anguish in his face” (111).

Instances of complete deletion are prevalent throughout the novel, with some bearing more stylistic consequence than others. One example of note is Ishmael’s well-reasoned justification for joining in Queequeg’s worship of his wooden idol, in which the following passage was completely removed: “Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth-pagans and all included-can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible!” (54). Another deletion ironically leaves an implied reference to Satan as an “intangible malignity,” but removes the subsequent “to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds” (160). Strangely, Melville’s inclusions of commonly accepted biblical facts were also deleted, despite their continued appearance in the very same Bible the editor sought to defend. She removed accurate references to “Solomon devoutly worshiping among his thousand concubines” and “Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright” (329; 179). Although these biblical facts may have been downplayed in the nineteenth century church-as relics of an earlier, more barbaric society-she apparently did not equate differences between Hebrew and British society with similar differences between British and American society, thereby allowing them to remain in the text.

In general, religious edits of this kind sought to subvert Melville’s almost Universalist acceptance of religious differences, as well as protecting the publisher from charges of religious blasphemy. Yet for all the work done in this effort, many biblical references were retained in full. On one page of Chapter 17 alone, in which Ishmael is locked out of his room during Queequeg’s Ramadan, there are four sacrilegious uses of God or Lord in the dialogue that were allowed to remain in the British version, despite their clear violation of the biblical commandment prohibiting use of the Lord’s name in vain (79). Likewise, she contradicts her standards in two adjacent sentences in Chapter 93, when Melville details Pip’s near drowning, deleting “indifferent as his God,” while allowing Pip to see “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom,” taking away God’s involvement in the first part and leaving it in the second (347). It is because of instances like these, where the editor failed to finish the task, that the novel was nevertheless chastised for its content by some British critics.

Edits of propriety generally encompass issues of obscene language and physicality. Profanity was replaced in the typical way, by leaving out enough letters to suggest the right word, without completely deleting it; thus, damned became d___d. In most cases, however, complete deletion of the offending word would have had little effect on the meaning, and if therefore, linguistic purity were the ultimate goal, then it is peculiar that the editor did not just remove the word completely. A similar occurrence exists in the aforementioned Chapter 17 dialogue surrounding Queequeg’s Ramadan, where the editor alters Ishmael’s blasphemous “for G_d’s sake!” (79). Again the editor seems to have weighed the ethical sensitivities of the audience against the need for marketability.

Also removed were physical topics considered profane by Victorian society, like references to sexual conduct (for procreation or otherwise), and parts of the body. References found objectionable by the editor include mentions of a “harlot,” a warning against “fornication,” and a description of Queequeg “ripening his apricot thighs upon the sunny deck (170; 97; 215). Another standards paradox is the editor’s changing of Queequeg’s “obstetrics” to “dexterity,” while allowing Melville’s detailed footnote about the nursing whale (290; 326), as if to indicate that the discussion of reproduction or infant nutrition is only acceptable for mammals other than humans. The somewhat quaint change of Melville’s description of whale courtship from “alas! all fish bed in common” to “alas! All fish have very vague ideas of the connubial tie” is yet another expurgation along similar lines (483).

In contrast to this prudishness, however, Melville’s Chapter 95 description of the whale’s penis-its role as fetish and its function as raincoat-is common to both editions, revealing yet another disparity between what was expurgated and what was allowed to remain. Further evidence of this lies in many of the homoerotic overtones that, at first glance, appear to have been left in because they do not carry the same connotation that they do today. Giles paraphrases scholar Leo Bersani who believes the “philosophical idea of homoeroticism is introduced so easily into Moby-Dick, precisely because, in psychological terms, so little is at stake.” Unlike characters in Gide or Proust who address the issue in subjective terms, Melville’s characters remain objective, which results in an effect on the reader of “puzzlement and alienation” (Giles 234). If this effect was felt by Bentley’s editor as well, then those passages may have been left alone by shear naïveté. In particular, Chapter 94, which recounts a gathering of the men around a tub of sperm, is left entirely intact. Modern readers may hypothesize that the sperm homophone was not recognized in the mid nineteenth century, yet to confirm the dual meaning of sperm in this book (as whale and as reproductive fluid), one need only examine Chapter 32 where Ishmael states, “this same spermaceti was that quickening humor [semen] of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses” (120). Thus the word did indeed carry both meanings in Melville’s time, and yet curiously, the editor did not see the homoerotic irony in Chapter 94. It may be far-fetched to accept that the editor was unaware of the potential symbolism of the Pequod’s crew with their hands playfully engulfed in a bucket of sperm, and while it is nearly impossible to grant a male editor that ignorance, a female editor, shielded from homosexuality by the standards of her time, could be excused for missing the connotation. While she obviously saw enough homoeroticism to delete references to both a “honeymoon” and the entanglement of legs from the narrative of Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed, she may have been innocent of the kind of hypererotic details suggested by the passage on sperm (54). This bit of evidence lends further credence to the proposition that Martha Jones, or admittedly another woman, might be the editor of The Whale.

In the area of offenses against national honor, the most obvious is the complete omission of Chapter 25, in which Ishmael chronicles the use of spermaceti as an anointing oil for British monarchs. While the editor was certainly Eurocentric in her judgment, she was not purely Anglocentric; she also protected the Turks and the Dutch by removing “…these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small” and “aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland”(329; 357) Ironically, she also took care to protect the French, the historic British nemesis, by changing “Louis the Devil” to “Louis Napoleon” and by removing Melville’s equating of cannibalism with eating pate de foix gras (136; 256).Yet if the deletion of Chapter 25 was performed to avoid charges of blasphemy against the British crown, then why was Chapter 90, in which Melville overtly denounces the preferential treatment of royalty, left untouched? Another telling alteration is the changing of “thou great democratic God” to “thou great God,” which suggests that this religious reference was acceptable as long as democracy, that prime American ideal, was not included as a suggestion of its superiority to monarchy (105).

The editor and Anglocentrism

Considering these contradictions in expurgation standards, what can we surmise about the nature of the editor and the standards she imposes on the audience? Whether through obvious misunderstandings or misintentions, a misreading of Melville, or just poorly written Melville, the nature of these edits and the conflicting way they were applied do tell us something about the editor. She obviously remembered the market, evidenced by balancing choices between what might be so offensive that it requires deletion, and what might be left alone, albeit risqué, to tempt some segment of the reading public. She was a pious woman and protective of her religion, deleting text that would slight the Christian church, including many references to biblical passages that could be excused by virtue of differing standards between the time of David and the time of Christ. She was offended by even the slightest reference to sexuality, intragendered or otherwise; however, although she deleted some passages containing homoerotic overtones, some of the most blatant were allowed to remain, indicating her knowledge of homoerotic particulars to be general and not specific. This naïveté might indicate the editor was a woman, which in turn lends credence to Horth’s supposition that the editor of The Whale is Bentley’s confidant, Martha Jones.

Also interesting is what the nature of these edits say about the relationship between the British and their now independent western colonies. Why, for example, were changes in standard American spelling introduced, even though the British readers would understand both the word and the reason for the differences in spelling? Why was the dominance of Melville’s authorial style made bland to accommodate the palate of British readers? And most importantly, why were mass expurgations necessary in the first place? If most of these changes were necessitated by American boldness, why were they not left in tact as an example of a style typical of the new American literature? The answers to these questions most certainly lie in the British culture’s sense of superiority over its crude, unrefined American cousin. The specifics of this superiority, and the literary and socio-economic evidence that supports it, is well beyond the scope of this paper, and yet as shown above, Melville’s work was most certainly subjected to it. Rather than denounce this discriminatory Anglocentrism, it is sufficient for my purpose to regard these changes not as an insult to Americanism, but as an example of the democratic freedom Melville espoused in his writing. The American publishers did not choose to censor Melville, since doing so would violate the principles upon which America was founded. The American edition of Moby-Dick makes full use of American First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, religion, and the press. The publication differences sufficiently speak to which culture was, at that time, better positioned for the free development of literary and artistic pursuits.

As for quality, Ament suggests, “The first English edition is an uninspired revision of the proof of the American. Many of the corrections of details are improvements, but most of the major changes are a weakening or unwarranted Bowdlerization of Melville’s highly colored style” (45). Though this may be the case overall, the British reading public, ignorant of the American edition and therefore unable perhaps to appreciate the brash, “colored style” would not have been the wiser. For some reviewers, the expurgations were still not enough, and no matter how much positive criticism was bestowed on the language and characterization, Melville’s offending content became the crux of many negative reviews. As a result, the question is whether the editor failed completely by not removing all of the potentially offensive material. Its existence poses two interesting questions: if Melville was aware of the changes, did he overrule some of them; or if unaware, then did the editor leave some in tact so as to appease Melville upon his discovering them? Nonetheless, while the British edition most certainly lost some of its allegorical complexity, it retained much of its stylistic and rhetorical thrust. The variants in the text, and what the expurgations might convey about cultural differences resulting from an emerging American national identity, certainly provide more “intellectual chowder” than a version that was authoritative all along. It helps keep Moby-Dick and Melville in the sights of literary researchers; it reveals the maturation of an American culture and its distancing from its British parents; and it provides a reminder of the importance of the publisher in the relationship between author and reader.

Works Cited

Ament, William S. “Bowdler and The Whale: Some Notes on the First English and American Editions of Moby-Dick.” American Literature 4.1 (March 1932): 39-46.

Giles, Paul. “‘Bewildering Intertanglement’: Melville’s Engagement with British Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Hayford, Harrison and Hershel Parker. “Textual Problems of Moby-Dick.” Moby-Dick. By Herman Melville. New York: Norton, 1967. 471-477.

_____. “Substantive Variants Between Moby-Dick and The Whale.” Moby-Dick. By Herman Melville. New York: Norton, 1967. 477-498.

Horth, Lynn. “Richard Bentley’s Place in Melville’s Literary Career.” Studies in the American Renaissance. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992. 229-45.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Eds. Hayford, Harrison and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.