John Marr and Other Sailors

John Marr and Other Sailors is a volume of poetry published by Herman Melville in 1888. Melville published twenty-five copies at his own expense, indicating that they were intended for family and friends. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to a reprint that "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet".^[1]

The "Inscription Epistolary" is to William Clark Russell, a British sea-story author who called Melville "the greatest genius the [United States] has produced" and "first" among the "poets of the deep".^[2] Like Timoleon, his other volume of late verse, scholars have assumed that it was a "private work of art", symptomatic of his withdrawal from the literary world. Melville was putting this collection together as he was also drafting Billy Budd, which, like several poems in this collection, had prose headnotes followed by full poems.^[3]