Melville: forgotten in life, alive in death

From a review in The New Statesman:

Nor do Melville’s prophecies end there. One of the most fascinating aspects of Moby-Dick is the way it drew on new science. Melville had read Darwin’s journals and he plagiarised scientific texts from the New York Public Library (which he then neglected to return). For the first time, the notion of entire species going extinct was being proposed. Yet in his chapter “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?”, Melville declares that the whale, for all the relentless pursuit by man, will survive, and he imagines it resurgent in a drowned world, spouting “his frothed defiance to the skies”.