Bezanson's research and editorial work rescued from neglect Mevlille's unappreciated epic poem, Clarel, and he published essays on Moby-Dick that were widely cited and reprinted.
He was a founding member and three-time president of the Melville Society, which established the Walter Bezanson Memorial prize in his honor.
With verse that is "tight, gnarled, and rugged," says Melville's early biographer Newton Arvin, much of the poem depends on complex allusions to the Bible, history, and geography as well as a play of thought that is "intricate, elusive, [and] sometimes shadowy".
"[8] The 1991 Northwestern-Newberry edition incorporates the Hendrick's House notes along with later findings and prints Bezanson's Introduction intact.
[5] Bezanson's lengthy essay, "Moby-Dick as a Work of Art," delivered in 1951 as a talk at Oberlin College to mark the centennial of the American publication of Moby-Dick, was the first to treat Ishmael as what he called the "enfolding sensibility of the novel, the hand that writes the tales, the imagination through which all matters of the book pass."
[10] His essay "Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream" further argued "It is the narrator who settles in to probe for understanding, summoning evidences from world culture in an effort to break through into meaning .
A modern reader's fascination with Moby-Dick might well begin with attention to Ishmael's search for forms— a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, and emblematic reading.
But the nub of its style came right out of the fisheries, especially the sort of hangman's humor not unlike the black comedy bred by modern wars .
Given a temperamental bent toward humor (merely struggling for existence in the pre-Pacific writings), Melville found right here in the whaleboat the perfect incubator for his hyena laugh.