Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land Add a review

Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is an epic poem by American writer Herman Melville, originally published in two volumes in 1876. It is a poetic fiction about a young American man named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Holy Land with a cluster of companions who question each other as they pass through Biblical sites. Melville uses this situation to explore his own spiritual dilemma, his inability to either accept or reject inherited Christian doctrine in the face of Darwin's challenge, and to represent the general theological crisis in the Victorian era.

Clarel is perhaps the longest poem in American literature, spanning 18,273 iambic tetrameter lines (longer even than European classics such as the Iliad, Aeneid and Paradise Lost). As well as for its great length, Clarel is notable for being the major work of Melville's later years. Critics at the time were baffled by its style, which is terse and philosophical, rather than the lyric and poetic style in his better known prose. But Melville has gradually gained a reputation as one of America's great nineteenth-century poets, and Clarel is now acclaimed alongside his prose fiction as one of his great works.