READING MOBY-DICK AND VARIOUS OTHER MATTERS
Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters is my most recent full-length collection. Writing about the long title poem, Rupert Mallin said that “Distance and intimacy, time and memory, great philosophy and the mundane play off against each other as they entwine. Here is an exceptional poem to be read over and over.”
Sarah Acton in Tears in the Fence wrote that
.... this 1851 review of Moby-Dick reflects in parts how I feel about Stannard’s Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters ...
‘High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.’ — London Morning Advertiser, October 24, 1851
The book is available here.