Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

The conclusion examines Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno, a novella of shipboard slave revolt, which imagines the Haitian Revolution as a hidden source of fashion and style. Melville’s tale also gestures toward the dominant tropes that would emerge in the later nineteenth century—the stories of zombis, vodou, and cannibalism as well as the constant preoccupation with natural disaster, disease, political corruption, and abject poverty that would predominate by the early twentieth century. Those tropes emerged in response to and often continued to reanimate the early history of Haitian revolutionary performances.