Introduction to Walter Bezanson’s “Interplanetary Criticism”

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Introduction to Walter Bezanson’s “Interplanetary Criticism” Bradley Ray King Leviathan is pleased to print Walter E. Bezanson’s unpublished review of Richard Chase’s Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949). A founder of the Melville Society and one of the most influential scholars in Melville studies, Bezanson is best known for teaching the field how to read Clarel when, as Hershel Parker put it, “no one else alive could make sense of the whole thing” (38). But before he assembled his magisterial edition of Clarel for Hendricks House (1960), Bezanson tried to publish this long, characteristically perceptive review of Chase in the summer of 1953. His papers at the Melville Society Archive include several drafts of the essay along with terse rejection notices from the Partisan Review and The Western Review. It is possible that Bezanson could not find a home for this piece because he wrote it almost four years after Chase’s book was published or because he wrote it in a playful style, r

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