Melville did not publish poetry until late in life and his reputation as a poet was not high until late in the 20th century.Melville, says recent literary critic Lawrence Buell, "is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson, yet his poetry remains largely unread even by many Melvillians." True, Buell concedes, even more than most Victorian poets, Melville turned to poetry as an "instrument of meditation rather than for the sake of melody or linguistic play." It is also true that he turned from fiction to poetry late in life. Yet he wrote twice as much poetry as Dickinson and probably as many lines as Whitman, and he wrote distinguished poetry for a quarter of a century, twice as long as his career publishing prose narratives. The three novels of the 1850s which Melville worked on most seriously to present his philosophical explorations, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, seem to make the step to philosophical poetry a natural one rather than simply a consequence of commercial failure.In 2000 the Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker wrote "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient". Some critics now place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others assert that his work more strongly suggests what today would be a postmodern view. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), a collection of Melville's late poetry, "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet". The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren was a leading champion of Melville as a great American poet. Warren issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring critical essay. The poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked of Clarel : "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'".