Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds

“If ever this dreadful incubus of a book [Clarel] (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health—but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern & anxiety about it—to put it in mild phrase.”—Letter from Elizabeth Melville to Catherine Gansevoort, 1876

Clarel, an 18,000-line poem, is one of the longest examples of the “faith-doubt” genre that arose in Victorian times and one that has largely …