<DIV><DIV><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none">Melville's long poem <I>Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land</I> (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.</p><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none">            But modern critics have found <I>Clarel</I> a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of <I>The Waste Land. </I>It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. <I>Clarel </I>is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville's poem to new life.</P></DIV></DIV>