Education Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Melville doesn’t get to be a “genius” here by floating above reality; he earns it by grinding against it. Van Doren, a critic with a Progressive Era faith in craft and competence, builds a three-part ladder that quietly deflates the myth of pure inspiration. First rung: “sound knowledge of actual whaling.” That phrase is almost stubbornly practical, a reminder that Moby-Dick’s authority isn’t atmosphere or swagger but lived technical fluency. Second rung: “much curious learning in the literature of the subject.” Van Doren is tipping his hat to Melville’s bookish scavenging, the way the novel raids sermons, travelogues, natural history, and nautical manuals. “Curious” is doing sly work: it signals both intellectual appetite and a slightly eccentric erudition, the kind that makes the book feel overstuffed on purpose.

Then the pivot: “above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts.” Subtext: facts are inert until a mind worries them into meaning. Van Doren isn’t praising fantasy; he’s praising transformation. “Worked” suggests labor, even violence, as if Melville’s imagination is a tool that presses, bends, and re-forges experience into symbol. That’s a critical defense against readers who see the encyclopedic whaling chapters as digression: they’re the raw material for metaphysics, not trivia.

Contextually, Van Doren is also making a case for American literature’s legitimacy. Melville didn’t borrow grandeur from Europe; he extracted it from an industry, a job, a world of grease, risk, and routine. The novel’s bigness, Van Doren implies, is not escapism. It’s what happens when expertise meets obsession.