^{Note 1 in page 606} In 1938, Willard Thorp set Melville's poems, for the first time, properly in the framework of his biography, pointed out some of their most distinctive qualities, and raised the question of whether they would not eventually be given attention more nearly proportional to that given the rest of his works. He was writing then in his Herman Melville: Representative Selections (American Book Company), and limits of space forced him to brevity. Ten years later, again working under restrictions, he supplemented what he had said with four pages in the Literary History of the United States (Spiller, Thorp, Johnson, and Canby, eds., Macmillan, 1948). In 1944, F. O. Matthiessen gathered some of the best poems with some of the most interesting in a brief edition for New Directions and, likewise forced to choose from much that he wanted to say, prefaced the collection with three pages of concentrated criticism (Herman Melville, Selected Poems, New Directions). In 1946 Robert Penn Warren's “Melville the Poet” appeared in the Kenyon Review, the first study of the poems long enough to give hope of covering the ground and still, if one must make a choice, the most illuminating study. Most recently Newton Arvin has given detailed attention to Melville's imagery and choice of words in the Partisan Review, xvi (1949), 1034–46.