William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville's poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville's darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns―among them Melville's heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the "transcendent act"―that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd.