| Sumario: | Although a number of scholars argue that Melville's Battle-Pieces sounds a warning that partakes of both admonition and consolation, that remains sceptical just as it tentatively affirms the possibilities of a new and bright future, too many claim that Melville's faith in the crowd and the ideals of the Founding Fathers can nowhere be found. Yet, the very style of the Battle-Pieces, which so many have dismissed with epithets like “grotesque” and “prosaic” and “turgid”, opens up a path by which the scholar may account more fully for Melville's optimism while recuperating his “graceless” versification. With the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I show that Melville's “amateurish” verse helps him to fashion what Stanton Garner calls “a poetics of his own”: a poetics that, subverting traditional definitions and practices, creating slippages and uncertainties, reinvigorating and redefining words and ways, invites the reader in not merely to help author the text but to engage in action, action that will ultimately help to rebuild America anew.
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