Question

The following passages discuss the late poetry of Herman Melville.

Passage A
Herman Melville’s turn to poetry in the latter half of his life has long puzzled those literary critics who revere the sprawling, philosophical ambition of his early prose works. However, this late transition is most accurately understood as a psychological and artistic retreat. Stung by the severe commercial and critical failure of his most ambitious novels, Melville sought a quiet refuge in the rigid, predictable conventions of nineteenth-century verse. The strict meters and conventional rhyme schemes he subsequently adopted offered a kind of structural safety that his freewheeling, boundary-pushing prose inherently lacked. In his poetry, Melville consciously curtailed the profound metaphysical inquiries and cosmic rebellions that had animated his earlier masterpieces. Instead, he embraced a muted, cautious formalism. He utilized the mechanical constraints of traditional verse to contain, distance, and ultimately suppress the existential anxieties that had previously overwhelmed both his characters and his contemporary readership. Thus, his poetic phase does not represent a new frontier of exploration, but rather a withdrawal from the literary vanguard—a weary resignation to the safe, the manageable, and the conventional.

Passage B
It is a critical commonplace to dismiss Herman Melville’s later poetry as a mere shadow of his great novels—a conservative capitulation to formal constraints by a defeated author. Yet this reductive assessment fundamentally misreads the sophisticated function of form within his verse. Far from being a retreat from intellectual rigor, Melville’s adoption of strict meter and rhyme was a highly strategic artistic evolution. The dense metaphysical speculation and profound moral ambiguity that characterized his prose did not vanish in his poetry; rather, these elements were forcefully distilled. By deliberately forcing his expansive philosophical inquiries into the tight corset of traditional stanzaic forms, Melville generated a profound linguistic and thematic tension. The rigid, orderly exterior of his poems acts as a necessary counterweight to their turbulent, often subversive underlying currents, creating a compressed energy that is entirely absent from the sprawling narratives of his novels. Therefore, the turn to poetry was not an abandonment of his sweeping philosophical ambition, but a precise refinement of it. Melville actively utilized formal discipline to articulate ironies and complexities that prose could no longer adequately contain.

Analyze the arguments presented in both passages. Match each interpretive claim about Melville's poetry to the correct attribution regarding its support in the texts.