Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy Of Creeds

Abstract

In Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds, Potter examines the poem within a historical context and by so doing attempts to resolve some of the issues critics have asserted the poem presents. He reviews the burgeoning field of comparative religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes discussions of many of the theories and ideas of well-known figures of the time, such as Hegel, Hume, Müller, Emerson, Whitman, and Schopenhauer. Potter attempts to account for the huge abundance of non-Christian material that appears in the poem. He maintains that Melville answers the nineteenth-century questions of faith through the heterodoxical themes and ideas shared by all religions that lie beneath their very different doctrines--redemptive suffering, the tempered heart, and the aversion to worldliness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.