This book is at the same time the least and the most "Melvillian" of all Melville's corpus. Melville wrote in Moby-Dick that "two thirds of the world revolve in darkness." This idea certaily holds true for most of Melville's works, but not Israel Potter. In this uncharacteristically light-hearted and crisply written rewriting of American history, Melville gives an early literary version of Woody Allen's film Zelig. The character Israel Potter is that same sort of insignificant historical non-entity who just happens to get caught up in incredibly significant historical moments. In his various wanderings Israel meets and becomes politically involved with a trio of the most important American patriots--Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen. It is through these encounters that Melville subtlely (and sometimes not so subtlely) realizes his critical agenda and those darker themes that dominate so much of his other work begin to show themselves. In his portrayal of Franklin, Melville takes a bash at what he sees as the exemplar of American "genius"--the same American genius that ignored and misunderstood his most significant works and forced him into obscurity and poverty in his lifetime. Melville sees Franklin as representative of all that is wrong with the American character--he is parsimonious, small-minded, hard-headed, and morally hypocritical. In the other two historical figures, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen, Melville finds redemption. In them he sees represented more of that European idea of genius, the manly half-savage/half-civilized genius of Thomas Carlyle. Like Queequeg in Moby-Dick who is described as "George Washington canabalistically rendered," Jones and Allen are wildmen in a civilized society, raging against the world as they utter their outrageous and at times incomprehensible truth. A fun yet undenialbly thought-provoking read. Enjoy

Since I can't find anyplace else on your page for a book-related comment, I'll put it here. Your listing for American Poetry: the nineteenth century give no indication that it is a 2-vol. set, but that can be deduced *if* one happened to do a title search and got the separate listings for vols. 1 and 2.

I think this would be useful not to say essential information for the potential buyer.

Volume 2 takes up where 1 left off, anthologizing in chronological order dozens of poets from Herman Melville (1819-1891) to Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904). Melville, Emily Dickinson, Sidney Lanier, and Stickney are given the most space. The last 150 or so pages of this anthology are given over to American Indian poetry and folk songs and spirituals. While I was a bit uncertain about what to expect from the Indian poetry, I was pleasantly surprised. Those poems and songs are printed in 19th century American English translations, and they mesh well with the rest of the volume

Volume 1 is a superb anthology of poetry, collecting poems from the works of dozens of poets, from Philip Freneau (1752-1832) to Walt Whitman (1819-1892). William Cullen Bryant, Maria Gowen Brooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Pearse Cranch, James Russell Lowell, and Whitman are given the most space. There is astonishing variety in here, with ballads, songs, and excerpts from epics; Romantic poems, Transcendentalist poems, political poems, etc, etc.

One wonderful thing about the Library of America's poetry anthologies is that they include something for just about every mood and every taste. Get this book: it will become a treasured part of your library.