Talk:Herman Melville/Archive 4

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Melville spelled "Melville" or "Melvill"?

Throughout the article, his name is spelled both as Melville and Melvill. Is this vandalism, or is it done on purpose or accident? [1]

A good question user:69.245.210.201-- you have sharp eyes! The answer is that Herman's ancestors spelled it "Melvill," but his brother Gansevoort changed the spelling, Hershel Parker says, perhaps for no reason other than that he "thought an extra letter afforded an aristocratic flourish, and certainly for no nefarious reason, since Melville was a variant spelling...." (p. 67).

I will add this information to the article, so many thanks for bringing it up!

PS But take note that new material should go at the bottom of the Talk Page (where I will move it) and that you should sign your comments with four tildes, like this: ~~~~ ch (talk) 19:09, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Information regarding the spelling is already covered in explanatory note a, but without Parker's guess at the reason for the change, which is the kind of guess biographers sometimes have to go into, but I tried hard not to include pure speculation in the article. Note A can be found at the first mention of the name after the lead, in the opening words of Early Life. Originally, I had placed it at the very first mention of the name Melville, which is the opening of the lead, but someone who visited the article moved it to where it is now. However, I had good reason to place the information where I put it: my model was the article for Elvis Presley which has Featured Article rating.MackyBeth (talk) 18:19, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Parker 2002 and Melville's alcoholism

When I added the data on the death of Melville's son, I supplied a reference to Parker (2002). Logically, ch read the reference as pertaining to the previous sentence as well and removed it. This confusion is almost inevitable when sourced material is added next to already available unsourced material, so it's good the confusion has been eliminated.MackyBeth (talk) 16:30, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Proceed with caution before expansion

A few thoughts. Good that MackyBeth is giving us warning of more material to come, but I would urge that we look over the recent changes first and digest them before making major additions. There is one apparent contradiction introduced into the first paragraph of the lead, the reintroduction of a sentence which we agreed to cut, and a misspelling in the text. The section on Writing Style has a lot of good material but in a jumbled order and is out of proportion to the article as a whole, more like a set of notes than the careful essay we are capable of. The subsection on Shakespeare needs a lot of editing to make it cohere. All the best.ch (talk) 06:48, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Restoring the sentence by Stanley Williams was explained above at the section about that quotation. The original request was made by someone who contributed nothing to this page, not before and not after his remark on that quotation. Therefore he is not an editor but a visitor of the page. The Talk Page is for editors of the page to reach consensus, and not a page where non-editors may submit their requests, which the actual editors then should have to carry out. If ch prefers his modification of Williams's quotation, then accept my apologies and I will restore it. Cheers.MackyBeth (talk) 08:49, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

The original suggestion from Ale And Quail, that the Shakespeare sentence was a stumbling block, was a good one. And it seemed we found agreement on a replacement that was more clear, without sacrificing precision. You, MackyBeth, now have reverted, as if you had harbored unexpressed disagreement with the discussion. And reverted to your version. My understanding of the use of Talk pages differs. As far as I know, talk pages are open to all, just as Wikipedia is the encyclopedia is anyone can edit. Suggestions should be judged on the merits, not on how many lines an editor has contributed to this or any article. After all, no one owns a Wikipedia article. I'd like to see you revert the 'Shakespeare' line to CH's version; THREE editors made a try at improving the sentence. It seemed to me that FOUR editors accepted the improvement. One of the good things about consensus is that it builds trust among editors. — Neonorange (talk) 21:00, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, Neonorange I see I was acting too selfish there. Restored CH's version. Still think Stanley Williams's sentence is great, and I remember well how pleased I was with it when I stumbled upon it.MackyBeth (talk) 21:41, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your gracious reply. Now I feel I must find a new favorite sentence for you. — Neonorange (talk) 04:36, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

MackyBeth, thanks very much for listening to Neonorange. I do hope you would try to keep in mind that all you say above about "visitors vs editors" really is nonsense on Wikipedia, isn't it? The idea that adding text is a contribution, and makes one "an editor", but an edit that shortens the text would not...to me, that's kind of nonsense, too. :(

I hope this can be informative, not inflammatory: while someone might quite normally contribute here only once, I bowed out of the previous discussion because I estimated I would be disagreeing with you repeatedly, and I was already discouraged by your seeming not to fully read what I had written. I concluded that further efforts were likely to be more frustrating than constructive. I feared I would struggle to stay courteous, as Neonorange and CH do so well. As I'm probably showing now, sigh. But at any rate, I doubt I could achieve the impressive commitment of time that you manage to sustain. I appreciate all three of your continued efforts — Ale And Quail (talk) 18:35, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Ale And Quail Good to hear your voice again. Please stick with us! I understand your concern with OWNERSHIP OF ARTICLES, and MackyBeth and I have had our little disagreements, but I continue to respect his or her level of commitment and energy in digging out useful scholarship. Even though they sometimes are not careful in hitting a balance, sometimes have careless mistakes, and sometimes simply add without looking at the overall structure of the section or article, these contributions have been important in developing the whole set of Melville articles. We also VERY MUCH need your edits and your comments in order that none of us gets out of line.ch (talk) 21:11, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

ch is right, we need all the perspectives we can possibly get. It may be of some use to Ale And Quail and others to explain my perspective of the Stanley T. Williams quotation that is still underlying this discussion. As Ale And Quail correctly pointed out, such quotation should be easy to understand for any reader. And I may not be the best judge of that, because I found the quotation by reading it in the original context. Judging the sentence as an individual statement then becomes difficult, because I cannot un-know the context. So others may have a clearer view on this, and other matters. If one editor adds information from a source, his view on how his edit may work out in the new Wikipedia context may be blurred by his knowledge of the whole source. Another thing: I am sorry that I gave the impression of not having fully read the posting. I did, but was puzzled by it, because I could not grasp the precise nature of the complaint. As ch said, we have had our little disagreements, and this can happen when articles are seriously being worked on by people who care about the subject. But Ale And Quail's reply is a good reminder that I should take care not to voice my disagreements in a way so as to repel other editors. Cheers.MackyBeth (talk) 15:18, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

The section "Critical response"

I would like to find out how editors look upon the section "Critical response." Well-developed parts there are "Contemporary criticism" and "Melville Revival and Melville studies," but after that it gets less satisfying. Do the two sentences about "The Melville Society" warrant a heading of their own? "Melville's poetry" cites a "recent literary critic," and we all know that it is not a good idea to use the word "recent" in an encyclopediae, because it is a problematic time-reference. In this case, recent means 1998. Then there are headings for "Gender studies" and "Law and literature," critical endeavors that seem to me too much of a niche for inclusion in an encyclopediae. In any case "Law and literature" deals exclusively with the interpretation of Billy Budd, and if it is worth retaining, belongs to the Billy Budd page. "Gender studies" is a collection of interpretive statements, and ""Melville's poetry" is a useful but non-chronological account of the reputation of the poetry (a chronological account would not have placed R.P. Warren's work in the 21st century).

To see how editors for articles on other writers deal with this material, the FAs for Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe do have a section for "Legacy" or "Influence and legacy." The B-article Jane Austen has a section "Reception." My suggestion is this. Since Melville's reputation has changed drastically after his death, it would be reasonable to have a section titled "Reputation" rather than "Critical response," containing the first three subsections. After we have investigated what may be useful of the other subsection, we merge that material into it and delete the rest.MackyBeth (talk) 08:25, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I suggest trimming back, rewriting and then see where you are. There's an argument to be made to explain something about scholarly studies, similar to the Critical reception section we put in Ezra Pound. For Pound it seemed particularly important because he's controversial. I handled Hemingway differently because it was the first article I wrote here and because he's not as controversial. I'm not up-to-date on Melville studies, so can't comment. I'd try to get a recent Cambridge Companion and see what you can find there - usually the more recent editions include the most up-to-date work and they've started adding essays about the state of scholarship. I believe most the the information in the Hemingway article came from a Cambridge Companion and the info in Pound came from a newly published CC. Best rule of thumb is to follow the sources and then section it out. Victoria (tk) 11:44, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Recently (2014) there has been published a new CC for Melville as well, a complemet to the first one (1998) by the same editor.MackyBeth (talk) 13:26, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Revised the lead, paragraphs 2 to 4

Paragraphs two, three, and four of the lead have been revised with the purpose to improve the organization of the information and present it in a more condensed way. Of course you will notice that its size has not been reduced but slightly expanded. That is because two works were not mentioned in the lead before: Redburn and Israel Potter. This omission has bothered me for some time: while it would be ridiculous to cite all of Faulkner's works in the lead to his article, Melville wrote so few prose works that it looks odd if two titles are just left out of the lead. Some information has been rearranged to see how it works: Clarel is now mentioned when Melville made the trip that was the basis for the book, in 1857, and not in the paragraph about Melville's period as a poet. If other editors feel this order is no improvement, please change it back yourselves, because I will probably not be back here until Friday.MackyBeth (talk) 17:25, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Put quoteboxes back

On April 3, two comparison quoteboxes were removed, the editing summary saying that they would be added to the Moby-Dick page. I put them back for two reasons: 1) they never arrived there; 2) the section Writing Style here is well served by having one or two examples of how Melville used his sources.MackyBeth (talk) 16:37, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Skepticism?

What is the literary movement of skepticism? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.153.137.103 (talk) 02:37, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Skepticism is more somewhat of a philosophical stance than a literary movement, I think. In the case of Melville, scholars use the word skepticism to denote his view of God and other themes, but not his literary technique or style. Hope this helps.MackyBeth (talk) 19:07, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

MackyBeth's explanation makes sense, that is, "skepticism" is not a literary movement, and no literary movement is mentioned in the article linked in the info box. So shouldn't we remove "skepticism" from the info box?ch (talk) 02:18, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

Yes. Melville prefigured modernism which uses skepticism as a tool—but to call s. a literary movement is a bridge too far. — Neonorange (talk) 04:20, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree with ch's proposal about the infobox. I never gave much thought to that part of the box, but the information there is in need of improvement. Romanticism and Skepticism are mentioned as if both are established literary movements, which is only the case for the first term, and perhaps even that is worth talking about here: should Romanticism not be modified to American Romanticism to accomodate Melville's place? The wikilink to Skepticism does not lead to a literary movement either; the link to Romanticism does. Perhaps for this reason the infobox says Romanticism and not American Romanticism, but I think it is perfectly normal to keep the link to Romanticism but add the word American. I wonder what you think. Also, the infobox cites under "Genre" the term "Gothic Romanticism", which term sounds to me as if it combines a genre (Gothic) with a literary period (Romanticism). More confusing than helpful, and an infobox, like a lead, is a place where one would expect to fine clear information and terms that are common usage in Melville scholarship.MackyBeth (talk) 16:02, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

feel free to delete this comment whenever you want, I just wanted to let you know as someone who came here to learn a bit more about Melville, this is a great article. It covers the basics but with some great semi-obscure details, includes interesting commentary about his style & content, & has piqued my curiosity about his later poetry. thanks for all your hard work; it's resulted in a very readable, engaging summary of Melville's life & writing.

Well, thanks for such a nice compliment! I worked hard on this article, and on Moby-Dick, until I got discouraged by users who happen to pass along, then insist on making one modification I disagree with, and then leave without ever contributed anything substantial. It's one thing to reach consensus with editors of the page, but I found it unbearable to have to accomodate non-editors time and again. But it's nice to see that someone appreciates my work.MackyBeth (talk) 17:33, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, MackyBeth for accepting this compliment on behalf of the rest of us! 😁 ch (talk) 16:36, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, after three weeks it was about time somebody accepted the compliment. Nevertheless I should have said that I can only accept the compliment for the "Writing Style" and "Themes" sections, because the work on HM's poetry and "Critical Response" are admittedly predominantly yours, ch. No offense intended.MackyBeth (talk) 17:07, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Please reconsider your complaint—editors who come to an article once are valuable contributiors. Editors who disagree with you are valuble contributor. Editors who practice collegiality are valuable contributors. — Neonorange (talk) 05:57, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Complaint reconsidered, but I stand by it after re-reading the discussion at the Moby-Dick TP on wikilinking "blank verse". But indeed, editors do practice collegiality are valuable.MackyBeth (talk) 17:28, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thoughts on the lede

It's great to reconsider the lede from time to time, since improvements come when we look with a fresh eye. MackyBeth's sparked me into a few more such revisions, e.g. questioning whether "the main characteristic" of HM's style was "probably pervasive allusion." Sealts (below) says allusion is one characteristic, not that it was the "main" one. It also struck me that MD needed a few more words (Billy Budd adaptations were not more important than MD), that there was no need to mention the Customs Inspectorate twice, and a few other minor edits for smoothness.ch (talk) 00:55, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

With thoughtful edits and considerations like these the lede is bound to develop into a condensed, well written introduction. The remark about the allusive characteristics of his writing style was written when I had not yet read about as many aspects of his style as I have now, so I feel I am now more up to the challenge of producing a more comprehensive yet concise description for the lede. How about thinking up a somewhat more informative way to describe MD canonical status than using the word "classic"? Something like "the obvious first choice for an example of The Great American Novel" perhaps? MackyBeth

Yes, indeed! The lede is now more informative and enticing, though perhaps other editors will want to chime in.

A few points, though.

• I've wondered for a long time as to whether we couldn't find a quote that was more informative and clearer about HM than the one from Williams, a wonderful scholar but otherwise unknown authority who will not carry much weight with readers. But for the moment, shouldn't he at least get the last word in the paragraph?
• I made a tweak or two in the nice new sentences on style, cutting a few adjectives and adverbs that pushed things a little too far ("highly" ""rich"). Probably the word is "bent" rather than "bend"?
• The Manual of Style on linking cautions against Overlinking, especially "everyday words understood by most readers in context." These readers probably won't need links to Wikipedia articles for even "baroque," especially since the article doesn't discuss literary style. "Compounds," "vocabulary," "myth," "ironical," and "visual arts" shouldn't be problems.
• "Centennial": the applicable advice from the policy page on links is rather than linking, "try to provide an informal explanation." So if the word is unclear enough to need a link, it seems better to simply add "1919 ."
• Nice question as to the brief characterization of MD. The whole concept of GAN strikes me as a can of worms; Buell, our authority in the article, shies away from saying that MD is one. As I recall, when I read the book as a whole (a good read, BTW), he was more interested in the popular belief that there is a "GAN" than in defining what one would be if there were such a thing. "Classic," to be sure, is only a little better, but at least it's only one word (the works in question have, however, appeared in the series "World Classics.")

Cheers! ch (talk) 22:00, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

It's not easy to decide what terms should be linked or not. Funny how that Williams quotation keeps coming up, we just are not going to agree on this one. I find it wonderfully illuminative and still regret the adjustment of it, really. But eventually we may stumble across something that everybody finds terriffic, you never know. Maybe MD should be called a classic of world literature, then? The word classic alone is a bit, well, not saying much specific. What I meant to communicate by saying "rich imagery" is that Melville's imagery establishes a sustained thread of related images, so that a kind of web is formed, as in the monastery motif in Benito Cereno or the way that in the first chapter of MD the prairie is described in terms from the sea etc. But how to express this characteristic briefly? Ay, there's the rub. Best wishes MackyBeth

Yes, much to ponder.ch (talk) 22:51, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Looking at the style description again, I noticed that yesterday's revision introduced some unfortunate wordings. The subtle but imo real difference between saying "sense of rhythm" or "rhythmic sentences" seems to me that the latter refers to some linguistic rhythm and the former to the more artistic use of rhythm of, for instance, a sentence rhythm that imitates in language the rhythm of the waves on the sea. The other thing that bothered me was that the mention of allusions was attached to the sentence in a grammar that suggests allusions belong to the category of imagery, and while it is possible to employ allusion to reinforce imagery, just as the vocabulary can be used for this purpose, allusion can be used for other purposes as well and is not a subcategory under imagery. Hope this clarifies the matter. Cheers MackyBeth

Question on need for citation of each quote

Many thanks to Curly Turkey for a sharp eye and a conscientious energy. But in reading WP:CITEDENSE I see that it suggests that when a paragraph deals with a single subject and is cited from the same source, a single citation is fine. I don't see that each quote from the same source needs to be cited, especially if they are in the same sentence. The object is to let the reader know the source of a statement without unnecessary clutter. Is there policy on this that I have missed? I'd be grateful to have it pointed out.

I also wonder if CT disagrees with the other, admittedly minor proofreads that were undone, such as "one sixths" to "one sixth," "echoe" to "echo," and whether there is any objection to adding the source of the quotes to Mathiessen in the text, as "Mathiessen points out..." ch (talk) 05:24, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't object to those other things that were undone—sorry about that! I've added them back (and the "Mathiessen points out" stuff), with the exception of "echoe"—could you explain that? I can't even find that as an alternate spelling in the dictionary.

With quotations the common practice is to include a citation for each, which is the standard expected at FA. Personally, I'd cut back on the quotes, though—the article is positively dense with quotes that could easily be paraphrased or dropped entirely to make for smoother prose. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:37, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply! I agree that there are too many quotes, and specifically the paragraphs on Shakespeare's influence and Bible, which simply string quotes together. A lot of work went into them, however, so out of respect for that editor I have not interfered. Perhaps we now should reconsider, however. In addition, there are more recent sources that should be tapped.

As to "echoe," I took it for a typo and changed it to "echo." Does that seem wrong?

The question remains of the need for a separate citation for each quote, even if it is one sentence. In looking at another article, H.L. Mencken, which faces some of the same challenges as this Melville article, I see a number of places where there are quotes without citations and even some paragraphs with no citations at all.

Hope that you will find time to do more work on this article. ch (talk) 05:54, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

"echoe"—sorry, I misread the diffs. I thought you added the "e" rather than removed it.

If you want to remove the citations for the quotes, I'm not going to fight it, but there are those at FA and GA who will insist on them, if you all want to take the article that far. Either way, while I sympathize about respecting the work that's gone into the content, in the end we want an article that's easy for the reader to navigate and digest. Often quotes get in the way of that goal.

If Mencken's missing citations, they'll have to be tracked down and added. Someday, anyways. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:34, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

It's stimulating to have some input by someone who is going through the whole article instead of just insisting that one minor detail be altered. CH, you probably missed the discussion on my talk page, but that density of citations is because of my initial misunderstanding of the attribution - needed tags, which I took for citation requests while it merely means that the source should be acknowledged by some introduction in the prose of the article. Actually, I deliberately used so many direct quotations to enable other editors to help paraphrasing, so that we can always go back to the original quotation in the edit history in case some disagreement comes up either between editors or during some peer review which I still hope we can submit either this or the MD article to in the not too distant future. For that same purpose, if you want to remove some of the citations, it is okay by me provided that you will be careful to avoid any sourcing issue at GA review. So go ahead if you feel like doing a round of supplying paraphrases for smoother reading. It's a tricky matter, though, to paraphrase a scholar's description of someone's writing style in such a way that the meaning of the description remains the same: even the "Writing style" section at Ernest Hemingway looks like a string of quotations, and that article is in the FA-Class. I do appreciate your consideration, ch, and I have been irritated at times, but I have also recognized that opposition from other editors simply is a test to see if one's edits are defensible. In one edit summary, Curly Turkey asks whether Melville should not be Melvill because the e was added later. Maybe a policy for such problems exists, but if not, we will have to follow what the Melville biographers do, if they show agreement on this at all. Initially, I thought about mentioning his name at birth only once and then refer to him with his familiar name henceforth, but that is obviously going to cause confusion in the early years were family members occur who never added the e to Melvill. This article could indeed use some more recent sources, I agree. But for the moment I plan to improve Benito Cereno some more. Cheers, MackyBeth

It looks like you've solved the "Melvill(e)" issue with an endnote.

As for "paraphras[ing] a scholar's description", I think that's an issue with a lot of articles: a forest vs trees thing. Scholars have some interesting things to say, but they're not always aimed at Wikipedia's target audience and can thus come across as opaque. When discussing style—especially with a writer as written-about as Melville—we want to keep things as general and direct as possible.

Aside from the readability issues so much quoting introduces, there's also the issue of such specific and attributed quoting coming off as less general than they really are. Okay, so Bezanson says Melville has an "immensely varied style". Is this his opinion, or his expression of a general consensus? Given the wording, it suggests it's perhaps his alone, which we know is not the case. If it were his opinion alone (which may be the case with other quotes) then up comes the question of whether the quote is perhaps WP:UNDUE weight. Given the shelves and shelves of books available on Melville, we want to be careful that the summary of his style etc reflects a general consensus, and represents it as so. We also want to make sure—keeping the target audience in mind—that the descriptions are straighforward as is reasonable and as much as possible not ambiguous.

Of course, quotes have their place. It would be hard to imagine a summary of Joyce that didn't include a quote about his "cloacal obsession"—though on Wikipedia we'd want an appropriate explanation of such a quote. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:16, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Further organization of the article

As you can see in the list of footnotes, the biographies of Hershel Parker and Andrew Delbanco are the basis for this article's biographical content until 1841, when Melville went on a whaling voyage. After that, the biography part is not a systematically developed text but composed of cherrypicking bits and pieces from various sources. The tags added by Curly Turkey prompted me to work ahead, so to speak, and I ask you: what do we do with his writings? Looking at FA-rated articles for Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemingway, it looks like a variety of structural organization is possible, but in each case in the biographical part of an article not much more is said about the works than their publication dates, for of course you can click on the title to see the article for any individual work. In Melville's case, it seems reasonable to contemplate if not a short remark on how each work was generally reviewed is in place, because the shape of his career is so famous for its sudden slide into obscurity that this seems more relevant to cover than is the case for writers with a more stable trajectory in that respect. Curious to read what editors think.MackyBeth (talk) 16:27, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

How long is Toby in the Typee Valley?

I see that the rephrasing is going on, but rephrasing from the article itself and not having the sources with you can lead to unintended digressions from the source. The time in the Typee Valley is based on two sources that both appear in the References with links to their online texts. Of those sources, Olsen-Smith says in his Chronology that Toby has already left the island when Melville boards the Lucy Ann. So how much time has Toby spend there with Melville? Since this was not clear from either chronology (Levine is silent on the matter), I figured I would follow Olsen-Smith in only saying that Melville spend 3 to 4 weeks and change it later if I stumbled across Toby's situation in a biography. So the revision of the sentence to include Toby too seems to introduce an assertion not covered by the sources. So please, go ahead and paraphrase whatever you feel needs rewriting, but the best way to make sure that paraphrasing does not amount to introducing your own assumptions is to check the sources when they are online. Cheers MackyBeth (talk) 17:35, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

The information on Typee does now include a concise account of Melville's use of his source, including the sentence "which he presented as his own observations." Since Typee is narrated by Tommo, the wording implies that Wikipedia editors are confusing the fictional Tommo's observations with Melville's.MackyBeth (talk) 18:19, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Good points, well put. Will fix -- am about to add a little tiny bit more on HM's return home and the dashing figure he cut telling his romantic tales. Parker has much (too much?) colorful detail. But the text needs to set up Toby's return and his confirmation of the basic truth of HM's assertions.ch (talk)

You are right about that. I recently worked on The Piazza Tales and apparently "The Encantadas" was much praised because it reminded reviewers of his first two books--ten years after they were first published. Also, on the title page of his later works it was not printed that he was the author of Moby-Dick, but the author of Typee. Those things make it legitimate to say that the context of Typee should be painted fuller in the article than that of his other books, because it influenced his life and reputation so much more, and certainly more than one would think from today's point of view. Cheers, MackyBeth (talk) 19:23, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

A few remarks about today's additions. Information on Pierre has been added, and looking at the surrounding sentences those must have been added years ago and might perhaps be removed. Generally, it is safe to assume that any unsourced material in the article was not supplied by the current editors. The reason I bring this up is that adding sourced material to a passage already contaning unsourced material could give the impression that the references also account for the unsourced stuff. Second, the now added sentence that Melville enjoyed the feminine companionship in the Typee Valley strikes me as just the kind of thing that is going to be tagged with a citation-needed template, so it's best to supply a reference directly behind that sentence. Third, in some of the notes links have been added to the online texts of Parker's two volumes. These links are also supplied in the list of References. Given the importance of this biography for this article--many more citations from it will come with future edits, you can count on that--it may be reasonable to provide a link with the notes as well, but if that is indeed the idea I would suggest to link only at the first appearance of a reference to his work, and for Vol.2 we don't yet know where that first reference will appear because that biographical part of the article is far from finished. Finally, assuming our ambition is still to prepare the article for GA-rating, I think that, really, virtually every sentence needs to be sourced, because the references not only account for the information supplied but also ensure an unambiguous delineation or limit to how far surrounding references account for the material. Cheers MackyBeth

You'll find that inline cites for every sentence is not a requirement, but there is a minority of editors who insist on doing so (for political or war articles, in my experience). The strongest objection to that would be on grounds of aesthetics and readability, but no guideline prohibits it. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:13, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Curly Turkey that inline cites for every sentence, much less for every clause, are not a requirement! Too many notes make the page look crowded, like laying barbed wire across it! Likewise, we are in danger of mentioning one scholar after another to the point that they are mentioned more often than Melville. As Curley Turkey commented above, there are already too many quotes (presumably the ones from scholars). Look at WP:CITEDENSE for a guideline.

As to the suggestion about linking or not linking the first appearance -- I'm afraid I do not follow what the suggestion is or what policy it is referring to. Could you rephrase it more clearly for my poor tired brain? Many thanks!ch (talk) 05:23, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't quite follow what that's referring to, either, MackyBeth. Could you clarify? Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:33, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Our mid understanding seems to be a conflation of three different issues. First, as I wrote above,my addition of notes to many separate clauses was not done because I myself or anyone else found that necessary, but because I simply misunderstood the meaning of the attribution-needed tag. In other words, these notes will have to be removed again. We agree on this point. Second, it is indeed not necessary to introduce so many scholars in the text and many of those sentences may be rewritten so that the names disappeared and just the information remains. My assertion that a reference needs to be supplied with, well, not every sentence but the majority of them is not a matter of my own taste but just what I conclude from looking at FA-rated articles on other writers, please take a look at Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway and count how few sentences there have no reference. Third, I noticed that material from Parker was added and that the citation did not just consist of a page number but also of a link to the online text. I didn't understand why, because that link is already supplied with Parker's entries in the list of References. So I figured, if it really seems necessary to link in a note as well, then it is logical to do so at the first reference to that book. But I don't think it is necessary at all. Hope this clarifies things. MackyBeth

Length

This article is awfully long: 60kb of readable prose. Per WP:TOOBIG that puts it at the point where splitting of sections into subarticles whould be considered, but I don't think that's the answer—a lot of the detail really doesn't belong in the main Melville article, but rather to the articles on his individual works. I'm talking about lines like these:

• For his first book, Typee, he borrowed so heavily from other books that it cannot be called a fictionalized account of his life among Polynesian natives without qualification
• In 2009 it was revealed that not only events in the valley but even the several days' walk to the valley as told in Typee is derived from another's book. Therefore, scholar Mary K. Bercaw Edwards finds it possible that Melville never entered the valley: "Instead, he may have lived, as many deserters did, with the tribes along the beach."

That's awful minute detail, and at this scope is just distracting. I suspect the length of the article could be drastically reduced by moving these kinds of details to the appropriate articles. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:31, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

You are of course right here and feel free to edit those details out again. I should have brought this up here at Talk instead of putting it in the article, on second thoughts. The thing is that even recent Melville biographies accept that Melville lived in that valley, for which no evidence exist. So for this article, I feel that we would do wise to keep our discussion of these weeks from his life as brief and general as possible, since there is not much fact to report anyway. As for the general length of the article, over the last few days I have been looking at some FA-rated articles for other literary figures such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway just to develop a good sense of what kind of conciseness we should be aiming at. And that's a lot more concise than I thought, because in the biographical sections of the articles really not much more is said about the literary works than the year of publication. So it seems to me to be a sensible approach that all editors of this page look at those FA-rated articles just mentioned or others, and that we review the article with those model articles in mind as a criterion, and decide what elements need to be cut down in size. I do of course not mean to have it inferred that we imitate the other articles length-wise, but apply the criteria Melville's case. Poe died at 40, Melville at 72, so the biographical section would be longer for Melville than the section for Poe. Likewise, Hemingway's writing style is known as simple or sparse, Melville's as complex, so a optimally concise writing style section for Melville would be lengthier than the one for Hemingway is, because an accurate description of complex style reasonably takes more space than for a simple, vernacular style. MackyBeth

Well, the length of a person's life isn't going to determine the length of their biography—(a) Felipe Alfau lived until he was 97, but his bio is unlikely to reach the length of Poe's, because his life was rather uneventful from the perspective of a Wikipedia article. (b) Some people's lives are eventful enough that subsections of their biography can be spun off into articles of their own, thus reducing the length of the bio in the main article. We should be concerned with length insofar as a particularly long article may be tiresome to read or difficult to navigate (or may be a symptom of excessive verbiage and trivial detail), but otherwise the length should be determined by the amount of detail deemed appropriate: how much in the article is giving proper context to the reader, and how much is trivia? digressional? For example, look at the three paragraphs on Melville's befriending of Hawthorne. That could perhaps be handled adequately in a few sentences.

I imagine a style section on Melville would be longer than one on Hemingway, but if gets too long (which it easily could) it could be spun off into a subarticle (where lots of detail would be appropriate) and leave a brief overview in the main article. Not saying that should happen, but it is an option to keep in mind. That goes for events in people's biographies as well—check out, for instance, Canadian drug charges and trial of Jimi Hendrix, which is an FA and 20kb of readable prose all by itself. If there's a lot of literature out there on Melville's travels or his friendship with Hawthorne, perhaps they warrant their own articles, which could relieve and focus the main article. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 14:06, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

As far as my own contribution to the biographical section goes, I developed the early years part by reading Parker and Delbanco's books up to 1841, just starting at page 1 and read through it. That has yet to be done for the rest, and though I added some material there as well, I planned to pay special attention at how much space other biographical articles reserve for discussing the books as soon as my reading of the bios would arrive at Melville's writing years. Since it's common procedure to say virtually nothing about the books--nothing on composition, content or reviews--I consider the section on Hawthorne and Moby-Dick as something that will have to be reorganized from scratch, basically. I would be very interested in writing the article on the Hawthorne - Melville friendship, so that this can be covered from both a Melvillean and a Hawthornian perspective. An abundance of publications for this exists well worth bringing together. Melville is the model for a character in one of Hawthorne's novels and scholars agree Hawthorne is the model for the Vine character in Clarel and this information is also worth bringing together in one article, methinks. MackyBeth

But to address your main point some more, the article is obviously too lengthy, especially if you take into account that the actual biography is far from finished. Moving the information on the literary works to the articles about them seems the logical thing to do. MackyBeth

Very little information on the literary works should be included here, actually

After I wrote here that I agreed that Typee is so essential to Melville's reputation that it should be described more fully, I noticed by looking at some FA rated articles that it is actually not usual at all to say anything about a writer's work in the biographical part of the article. So I corrected my earlier mistake here on the Talk page. Material on the novels now present in this article, may be moved to the articles for those novels, including what has just been added on Typee. But before doing that, you might want to look at those articles for Mary Shelley, Poe and Hemingway to get a sense of what information about the novels should be left here. MackyBeth

In the spirit of the whalers reducing whale oil by "trying out," I have "tried" some passages. For instance, MackyBeth found an important article by Mary K. Bercaw, which I read with much thanks. Bercaw summarizes the current thinking on the relation of what HM wrote to what actually happened. Great reasoning. This reference should stay, but I hope that I caught the essence of what most readers will need without going into great detail.

But more than with the authors MackyBeth usefully mentions above, the arc of HM's life depended on what he wrote and how much it succeeded. His life after 1846 or so was pretty dull. So we need to prune but keep enough to show what he was attempting. This does not involve plot summary as much as characterization of what his writing was trying to accomplish.

BTW, I finally realized after seeing it so many times that the characterization of Typee in the lede should be changed from "sea adventure." ch (talk) 20:15, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

When I read Bercaw's essay I realized that even on the most widely accepted facts major revisions are still possible. CH is not the only one to have overlooked for quite some time that Typee indeed is no sea adventure. I made some additional revisions, improving the accurateness of the Typee description. My impression is that most of the times when CH and I would phrase things differently, it boils down to a difference in our respective backgrounds: in literary studies you are taught to be careful not to identify narrators with their authors. I bring this up because I feel we are currently experiencing constructive collaboration, and if we have a clear understanding of this underlying context, that may help us to avoid feeling irritated with each other as we did in the past. Cheers MackyBeth

What should the lead say about the books?

The lede is quiet lengthy and now that information has been added about the reception of the works it seems a good idea to ask ourselves what the lede should say. Stating the year of publication, a very brief indication of what kind of book it is and if it was based on his own experiences should be enough, I feel. The reception or (lack of) succes should,I believe, only be mentioned at career turning points, of which there are two: the immediate enormous succes of Typee and the slide into obscurity starting with Pierre. Point 2, I just read in the lead that Mardi was not well received, "nor" was Redburn. Please tell me what source was used to describe the unfavorable reception of Redburn with. Branch 1974, (Melville: The Critical Heritage) says, after a few quotations, "Despite these various reservations, the reviewers in general welcomed Redburn as a return by Melville to his best area--the simple, straightforward tale of nautical adventure--perhaps not as interesting or novel as Typee and Omoo but certainly an improvement over Mardi" (21). Also, see the Reception at Redburn. MackyBeth (talk) 09:58, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Again, good points, well put. I've made emendations accordingly. The lede is now ever so slightly shorter than before -- 640 words compared to 659 at here. I agree that it may still be too long and will try to try-out a little more and to make the book characterizations (which I still think are essential) even more pointed, pithy, and perhaps perspicacious.ch (talk) 19:55, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree that some characterization of the books are essential, because it makes no sense to only state the publishing year, which would add nothing to a mere listing. It may also be worth to look at the Lede from a smartphone--user point of view. Accessing this article with such device, the lede, with the concise characterizations of the reception, really looks like a handy thumbnail biography. MackyBeth (talk) 09:58, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Acushnet Crew List image copyright status

A Google search for "Acushnet Crew List" turns up quality scans of the item, published on various websites but not on Wikimedia Commons. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about copyright issues knows if we can use this item as an illustration in the article. It would be a meaningful illustration and offer something different than just pictures of Melville (family members). To cover this item in the article in any case, I made footnote c which has a link to the crewlist. I am also curious to hear if fellow editors find this worth adding to the Moby-Dick page as well. CheersMackyBeth (talk) 14:34, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

Size of lead section in Melville appears to be over Wikipedia policy

The current length of the Herman Melville opening paragraphs appears to be over Wikipedia policy of WP:LEDE and WP:LEADLENGTH. Recent edits appear to have reverted the article to be over Wikipedia policy of 3-4 paragraphs instead installing the eight paragraphs which are now edited into the article. Can this be repaired. CodexJustin (talk) 15:28, 22 December 2018 (UTC)