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James Merrill
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: James Ingram Merrill |
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| Biography: James Merrill |
A lyrical and mystical poet often compared to W. H. Auden and William Butler Yeats, James Merrill (1926-1995) is best known for his series of poems inspired by the automatic writing and messages of spirit guides through the medium of an Ouija board. These poems were collected in "The Changing Light at Sandover" (1982).
While Merrill's poems are not self-confessional, he used formal poetic structures to blend autobiography with archetype and fable, creating a sense of inner tension and authenticity.
Merrill was born in New York City in 1926, the son of Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, the stock brokerage. Wealth brought privilege: Merrill was educated at private schools where the written word and poetry were emphasized, and he also had a multi-lingual governess as a young boy who taught him respect for languages. An appreciation for music, especially opera, came early to Merrill, and that dramatic form had a lasting influence on his poetry. Versification was encouraged in the Merrill household, so much so that in Merrill's senior year at Lawrenceville School, his father privately published his first book of poems. Merrill attended Amherst College, where he continued to write poetry, though his studies were interrupted by a year in the infantry during World War II. Returning to Amherst, he published poetry in Poetry and Kenyon Review and completed his thesis on Marcel Proust. Proust, in his fascination with the everyday and with one's own history, would have a lasting influence on Merrill's later poetry. Wealth also meant that Merrill did not have to earn his living from poetry and could live where he wanted as he wanted. Throughout his life, he travelled in Europe extensively, and made homes in Stonington, Connecticut; Athens, Greece; and New York City. With the death of his father, Merrill established the Ingram Merrill Foundation to provide grants to writers and painters. Merrill died of a heart attack in Tucson, Arizona, in 1995.
Merrill's literary product shows a gradual ripening and maturity of form from the first of his published works up through the last. The poems in First Poems (1951) received mixed reviews, and for the next several years, Merrill wrote short stories, a novel, and tried his hand at theater. With The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), Merrill came back to poetry with elegant formal poems that display a cultivated taste in things domestic and in travel. In ways, the poems here chronicle the early life of an American aristocrat, and received the same mixed reviews as his earlier poems. Water Street (1962) continues to chronicle Merrill's life, loves, and travels, but the language is tighter, the verse line more colloquialized. Merrill won his first National Book Award for Nights and Days (1966), a book that takes on Yeats's great theme of wisdom coming from age and dissolution. Fire Screen (1969) and Braving the Elements (1972) continue to demonstrate a developing maturity on Merrill's part. The twin themes of time and eros have been established in his poetry; the formalism is still there, but does not dominate the work; and the elegance has given way to a more gritty stance. Merrill won the Bollingen Prize in 1973 for Braving the Elements. A smooth, conversational narrative style had been established in Merrill's poetry by the early 1970s, paving the way for his major works, Divine Comedies (1976) and Mirabell: Books of Numbers (1978). Merrill and his long-time companion, David Jackson, had been experimenting with a home-made Ouija board since 1955. Whether a folie a deux or a connection to a higher spiritual plane, such activities put Merrill in touch with a spirit guide, Ephraim, who led the poet to a mystical and sacred dialogue reminiscent of a blend of Yeats, Dante, Proust, Byron, and Auden. With these poems - the first of which were twenty years in the writing - Merrill became more than a lyric poet. He fused autobiography and archetype; created an epic approach to his life; and, with Mirabell, developed a scientific/religious metaphor for the meaning and flux of the universe. Merrill won a Pulitzer Prize for Divine Comedies and a second National Book Award for Mirabell: Books of Numbers. These poems were completed with Scripts for the Pageant (1980). Until his death, Merrill continued to produce poetry of note, as well as a memoir, A Different Person (1993), which reflected not only on his family, but on his homosexuality in relation to his writing.
The accomplishment of James Merrill was his steady growth from gentility to vision; from formal elegance to prophecy and epic poetry. Once he left mere gentility behind and dealt with themes more dramatic and personal, Merrill's poetry took on a weight and importance that brought critical acclaim from all quarters. The sacred books collected in The Changing Light at Sandoverare regarded as a major poetic statement, and Merrill as a metaphysical poet who employed both wit and charm.
Further Reading
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 6, 1976; Volume 8, 1978; Volume 13, 1980; Volume 18, 1981.
Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium, Farrar, Straus, 1968.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume V: American Poets Since World War II, Gale, 1980.
Kalstone, David, Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Oxford University Press, 1977.
Labrie, Ross, Merrill, 1982.
Lehman, David, and Berger, Charles, editors, James Merrill: Essays in Criticism, Cornell University Press, 1982.
Moffett, Judith, Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry, 1984.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: James Merrill |
Merrill, James (James Ingram Merrill), 1926-95, American poet, b. New York City. Born into wealth as the son of Charles Merrill, he studied at Amherst College (grad. 1947) and was free to live as he pleased and to devote much of his time to poetry. One of the most admired poets of his generation, he is noted for the technical virtuosity, elegant formality, refined lyricism, and witty urbanity of verse that, while always reserved, became more autobiographical, intimate, and colloquial over the years. His early volumes include First Poems (1951), Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966), The Fire Screen (1969), and Braving the Elements (1972). His most ambitious work was published in three parts (1976-80) and released in its entirety as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). In it, Merrill (with his companion David Jackson) used a Ouija board to invoke the spirits (and the spirit) of his aesthetic forebears. Among later volumes are Late Settings (1985), The Inner Room (1988), and A Scattering of Salts (1995). His lyrics are gathered in James Merrill: Collected Poems (2001). Merrill won every major literary award for poetry, including the Pulitzer and Bollingen prizes and two National Book Awards. He also wrote plays, e.g., The Immortal Husband (1955); novels, e.g., The Seraglio (1957); and essays, e.g., Recitative (1986).
Bibliography
See his memoir, A Different Person (1993); his Collected Novels and Plays (2002), Collected Prose (2004), and Selected Poems (2008), ed. by J. D. McClatchy and S. Yenser; R. Labrie, James Merrill (1982), J. Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction (1984), S. Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1986); M. Blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (1995); A. Lurie, Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson (2001).
| Works: Works by James Merrill |
(1926-1995)
| 1951 | First Poems. Merrill's first major collection is an eloquent and witty group of poems written in the style of the metaphysical poets. Praised for its formal precision, the collection is also criticized by some for a lack of emotional intensity. |
| 1959 | The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems. Having explored drama in The Bait (1953) and The Immortal Husband (1958) and fiction in the novel The Seraglio (1957), Merrill returns to poetry in his last volume written in the formal style of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. |
| 1962 | Water Street. Merrill's collection celebrates his residence in Stonington, Connecticut, in a series of poems exploring his life, travels, and past with an increased candor and intimacy. |
| 1966 | Nights and Days. In Merrill's National Book Award-winning collection, the poet continues his exploration of personal experience begun in Water Street (1962), most notably in poems such as "The Broken Home" and "Matinees." A similar collection, The Fire Screen, containing the long verse narrative "The Summer People," would follow in 1969. |
| 1969 | The Fire Screen. Merrill's collection includes the long poem "The Summer People," "Matinees," and a sonnet sequence. |
| 1972 | Braving the Elements. Merrill earns the Bollingen Prize for this collection thematically linked by different survival responses to existential, natural, and interpersonal crises in works such as "After the Fire" and "Days of 1935." |
| 1976 | Divine Comedies. The first installment of a trilogy ultimately published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover wins the Pulitzer Prize. The trilogy gains notoriety because Merrill's lover, David Jackson, appears in it as a co-medium with whom the poet recalls dead spirits while using a Ouija board. |
| 1978 | Mirabell: Books of Number. Merrill's National Book Award-winning collection continues the poetic narrative begun two years earlier in "The Book of Ephraim," a poem described as "Merrill's supreme fiction, a self-mythologizing within an epic program." |
| 1982 | The Changing Light at Sandover. Critics praise this collection as a "sacred epic in a postreligious age." It combines parts of three previous books, Divine Comedies (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980). This trilogy, plus a new coda, "The Higher Keys," reflects Merrill's ambitious poetic program--akin to Dante's and Milton's--to portray the spiritual dimension of the world in verse. |
| 1985 | Late Settings. Merrill treats life as a comedy worthy of precise observation. His easygoing yet polished verse also reflects Merrill's affection for popular culture. He tends to eschew obviously profound subjects and instead focuses on elegant, disciplined observation of the commonplace. |
| 1995 | A Scattering of Salts. Published posthumously, this is the last of Merrill's works. In it the poet meditates on his art in poems such as "Nine Lives," a work that assigns him only a small role in the great drama of life. |
| Wikipedia: James Merrill |
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist (if deeply emotional) lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which dominated his later career.
Contents |
Life
James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City to Hellen Ingram Merrill and Charles E. Merrill, founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. He had two older half siblings (a brother and a sister) from his father's first marriage. As a boy, Merrill enjoyed a highly privileged upbringing in economic and educational terms. Merrill's childhood governess taught him French and German, an experience Merrill wrote about in his 1974 poem "Lost in Translation."
His parents separated when he was eleven, then divorced when he was thirteen years old. As a teenager, Merrill attended the Lawrenceville School, where he befriended future novelist Frederick Buechner.[1] When Merrill was 16 years old, his father collected his short stories and poems and published them as a surprise under the name Jim's Book. Initially pleased, Merrill would later regard the precocious book as an embarrassment.
Merrill was drafted in 1944 into the United States Army and served for eight months. His studies interrupted by war and military service, Merrill returned to Amherst College in 1945 and graduated in 1947. The Black Swan, a collection of poems Merrill's Amherst professor (and lover) Kimon Friar published privately in Athens, Greece in 1946, was printed in just one hundred copies when Merrill was 20 years old. Merrill's first mature work, The Black Swan is Merrill's scarcest title and considered one of the 20th century's most collectible literary rarities. Merrill's first commercially published volume was First Poems, issued in 990 numbered copies by Alfred A. Knopf in 1951.
Merrill's partner of more than four decades was David Jackson, also a writer. Merrill and Jackson met in New York City after a performance of Merrill's "The Bait" in 1953. Together, they moved to Stonington, Connecticut in 1955. For two decades, the couple spent part of each year in Athens, Greece. Greek themes, locales, and characters occupy a prominent position in Merrill's writing. In 1979 Merrill and Jackson began spending part of each year at Jackson's home in Key West, Florida.
In his 1993 memoir A Different Person, Merrill revealed that he suffered writer's block early in his career and sought psychiatric help to overcome its effects. Merrill painted a candid portrait of gay life in the early 1950s, describing relationships with several men including writer Claude Fredericks, art dealer Robert Isaacson, David Jackson, and his last partner, actor Peter Hooten.
Despite great personal wealth derived from unbreakable trusts made early in his childhood, Merrill lived modestly. A philanthropist, he created the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the name of which united his divorced parents. The private foundation operated during the poet's lifetime and subsidized literature, the arts, and public television. Merrill was close to poet Elizabeth Bishop and filmmaker Maya Deren, giving critical financial assistance to both (while providing money to many other writers, often anonymously).
Merrill served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1979 until his death. While vacationing in Arizona, he died on February 6, 1995 from a heart attack related to AIDS.
Awards
Beginning with the prestigious Glascock Prize, awarded for "The Black Swan" when he was an undergraduate, Merrill would go on to receive every major poetry award in the United States, including the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies. Merrill was honored in mid-career with the Bollingen Prize in 1973. He would receive the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover (composed partly of supposedly supernatural messages received via the use of a Ouija board). In 1990, he received the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress for The Inner Room. He was awarded the National Book Award for Nights and Days in 1967 and again in 1979 for Mirabell: Books of Number.
Style
A writer of elegance and wit, highly adept at wordplay and puns, Merrill was a master of traditional poetic meter and form who nevertheless produced significant quantities of free and blank verse. Though not generally considered a Confessionalist poet, James Merrill made frequent use of personal relationships to fuel his "chronicles of love & loss" (as the speaker in Mirabell called his work). The divorce of Merrill's parents — the sense of disruption, followed by a sense of seeing the world "doubled" or in two ways at once — figures prominently in the poet's verse. Merrill did not hesitate to alter small autobiographical details to improve a poem's logic, or to serve an environmental, aesthetic, or spiritual theme.
As Merrill matured, the polished and taut brilliance of his early work yielded to a more informal, relaxed voice. Already established in the 1970s among the finest poets of his generation, Merrill made a surprising detour when he began incorporating occult messages into his work. The result, a 560-page apocalyptic epic published as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), documents two decades of messages dictated from otherworldly spirits during Ouija séances hosted by Merrill and his partner David Noyes Jackson. The Changing Light at Sandover is one of the longest epics in any language, and features the voices of recently deceased poet W. H. Auden, Merrill's late friends Maya Deren and Greek socialite Maria Mitsotáki, as well has heavenly beings including the Archangel Michael. Channeling voices through a Ouija board "made me think twice about the imagination," Merrill later explained. "If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."[1]
Following the publication of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill returned to writing shorter poetry which could be both whimsical and nostalgic: "Self-Portrait in TYVEK Windbreaker" (for example) is a conceit inspired by a windbreaker jacket Merrill purchased from "one of those vaguely imbecile / Emporia catering to the collective unconscious / Of our time and place." The Tyvek windbreaker — "DuPont contributed the seeming-frail, / Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail" — is "white with a world map." "A zipper's hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes / Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap."[2]
Works by Merrill
Since his death, Merrill's work has been anthologized in three divisions: Collected Poems, Collected Prose, and Collected Novels and Plays. Accordingly, his work below is divided upon those same lines.
Poetry
- The Black Swan (1946)
- First Poems (1951)
- The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959)
- Water Street (1962)
- Nights and Days (1966)
- The Fire Screen (1969)
- Braving the Elements (1972)
- Divine Comedies (1976), including "Lost in Translation" and The Book of Ephraim
- Mirabell: Books of Number (1978)
- Scripts for the Pageant (1980)
- The Changing Light at Sandover (1982)
- From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (1982)
- Late Settings (1985)
- The Inner Room (1988)
- Selected Poems 1946–1985 (1992)
- A Scattering of Salts (1995)
Posthumous editions
- Collected Poems (2001) ISBN 0-375-41139-9
- Selected Poems (2008) ISBN 0-375-71166-4
Prose
- Recitative (1986) - essays
- A Different Person (1993) - memoir
- Collected Prose (2004) ISBN 0-375-41136-4
Novels and Plays
Novels
- The Seraglio (1957)
- The (Diblos) Notebook (1965)
Drama
- The Birthday (1947)
- The Immortal Husband (1955)
- The Bait
Collection
- Collected Novels and Plays (2002) ISBN 0-375-41137-2
Works about Merrill
- James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983)
- Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (1984)
- Reflected Houses (1986) audio recording
- Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987)
- Robert Polito, "A Reader's Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover" (1994)
- The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill (1999) Audio Book
- Alison Lurie, Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson (2000)
- Piotr Gwiazda, James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century) (2007)
- Reena Sastri, James Merrill: Knowing Innocence (2007)
References
- ^ Gussow, Mel. "James Merrill Is Dead at 68; Elegant Poet of Love and Loss", The New York Times, February 7, 1995. Accessed October 31, 2007. "He went to Lawrenceville School, where one of his close friends and classmates was the novelist Frederick Buechner."
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Learn More
 | Lost in Translation (Further Reading) (poem) |
| Lost in Translation (Sources) (poem) |
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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| Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "James Merrill". Read more |
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