The article centers on Enchafèd Flood: Romantic Iconography of the Sea, a series Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by W. H. Auden at University Virginia in 1949, which he analyzed and late nineteenth-century images sea, contrasted with desert, giving partisan interpretation Melville’s selected prose (Moby-Dick particular). As his reconsideration iconography is underpinned political agenda, this I...