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Authors
James Merrill (1926-1995)
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An edition of Merrill’s Collected Poems (2001), edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, brings together the poems from all of Merrill’s books, with the exception of his book-length epic, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). Merrill also published a prose collection, Recitative (1986); a charming memoir, A Different Person (1993); two novels, The Seraglio (1957) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965); and three plays: The Immortal Husband (1956), The Bait (1960), and The Image Maker (1986). Useful critical essays appear in David Kalstone’s Five Temperaments (1977), James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983), edited by Lehman and Berger, and Critical Essays on James Merrill (1996), edited by Guy Rotella. Stephen Yenser’s book-length study of Merrill’s work, The Consuming Myth (1987), is invaluable. More-recent critical work includes Timothy Materer’s James Merrill’s Apocalypse (2000) and Rachel Hadas’s Merrill, Cavafy, Poems and Dreams (2000).
Born into the Merrill family of Wall Street brokerage fame, James Merrill was educated at Amherst College, where he later wrote an honors thesis on Marcel Proust. Like Proust, Merrill explored the idea that memory can enable one to relive the formative experiences of childhood. He often returns to his boyhood home in his poetry, reshaping the past to help him understand the texture of the present. Travel also figures in his work: his time in Greece resonates throughout The Fire Screen (1969), and Braving the Elements (1972) addresses the landscape of the American West. In 1977 Merrill received the Pulitzer Prize for Divine Comedies, the first work in a trilogy, in which he reflects upon his life through the medium of a ouija board. The two following books, Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant, appeared in 1978 and 1980, respectively, and the entire work is collected in The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). Other volumes of poetry by Merrill include Water Street (1962) and A Scattering of Salts (1995).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Like Robert Lowell, James Merrill was born to a patrician New England family and educated at elite schools -- and like Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, and Plath, Merrill eventually wrote poetry about family and personal experience, poetry that could be called "confessional." But Merrill's verse stands apart, for Merrill believed in the imagination and the educated intellect as human powers that could transform the past, including personal anguish, and give it meaning, not just expression. In a Merrill poem, the poet-speaker recollects with a measure of Wordsworthian tranquillity and celebrates the power both of thoughtful retrospect and of the poem to give form and even a measure of beauty to what Jarrell called "the dailiness of life."
1. An Urban Convalescence (1962), is a poem with rhymes, assonance, and many iambic pentameter lines. But it also contains many departures from regularity. Why would a modified formality be appropriate in this poem?
2. The Broken Home (1966) ends with a pun: the "setter" is both the setting sun and the Irish setter remembered from Merrill's boyhood in the house and mentioned in lines 43-46. Why end a somber reminiscence with a pun? Why close such a poem with two highly formal rhymed stanzas? Describe how this poem arrives where it does, emotionally and formally.
3. What is Family Week at Oracle Ranch (1995) about? The poem is adorned or littered with pop-culture allusions and topical references. Describe how and why these are included. What is the overall tone of the poem? What seems to be Merrill's view of the way that New Age culture explores the mind? What elements in the poem give you that sense? Do you see similar views implicit in other Merrill poems?
