Difference between revisions of "James Merrill" - New World Encyclopedia

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[[Image:JamesMerrill.JPG|framed|right|poet '''James Merrill''', age 30, in a 1957 publicity photograph for ''[[The Seraglio]]''.]]
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[[Image:JamesMerrill.JPG|framed|right|poet '''James Merrill''', age 30, in a 1957 publicity photograph for ''The Seraglio''.]]
  
'''James Ingram Merrill''' ([[March 3]], [[1926]] – [[February 6]], [[1995]]) was a [[Pulitzer Prize]] winning [[United States|American]] [[poet]], one of the most acclaimed American poets of his generation.
+
'''James Ingram Merrill''' (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was a [[Pulitzer Prize]] winning American poet, one of the most acclaimed American poets of his generation. Writing in the decades after [[World War II]] when literary [[Modernism]] had all but collapsed, Meriill's poetry—elegant, witty, and formally masterful—helped to chart the directions American poetry would take in the second half of the 20th-century. Like [[W.H. Auden|Auden]] or [[W.B. Yeats|Yeats]], Merrill was a master of traditional rhyme-and-meter who was also adept at writing in free verse, and his poems often phase in and out of strict and loose forms, creating poetry that is simultaneously modern and traditional. A major figure in the resurgence of poetic forms in the latter 20th-century, as well as an influential philanthropist who founded the Ingram Merill Foundation, Merrill is one of the most important American poets of the 20th-century.
  
 
== Life ==
 
== 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 language|French]] and [[German language|German]], an experience Merrill wrote about in his 1974 poem "[[Lost in Translation (poem)|Lost in Translation]]."  
+
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 which would be essentialy to the development of Merrill's urbane, worldly style.   
  
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]]. 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.
+
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. 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 (book)|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 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 professor Kimon Friar published privately in [[Athens, Greece]] in 1946, was printed in just one hundred copies when Merrill was 20 years old. Considered to be Merrill's first mature work, ''The Black Swan'' is Merrill's scarcest title and is 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 Noyes Jackson|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 1955 Merill moved to Stonington, Connecticut. A year later, Merill purchased a home in Athens, Greece—Greek themes would become a frequent landmark in Merill's literary landscape—and for the next twenty years he would shuttle back and forth between the two residences. In spite of his immense inherted wealth, Merrill lived modestly, giving most of his money away (often anonymously) to support poets and writers in need of financial assistance. 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. The novelist Alison Laurie, a close friend of Merill, would write that during these years he was a "kind of Martian: supernaturally brilliant, detached, quizzical, apart."
  
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 humbly. A philanthropist, he created the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the name of which united his two 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.
  
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 two 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]].
  
Merrill served as a Chancellor of the [[Academy of American Poets]] from 1979 until his deathWhile vacationing in [[Arizona]], he died on [[February 6]] [[1995]] from a [[myocardial infarction|heart attack]] related to [[AIDS]].
+
== Style ==
 +
A writer of elegance and wit, highly adept at wordplay and puns, Merrill was a master of traditional poetic meter and [[Formalism|form]] who nevertheless produced significant quantities of free and blank verse. Though not generally considered a [[Confessionalism|Confessionalist]] poet, James Merrill made frequent use of personal experiences 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. Easily Merrill's most famous work, and the finest example of his urbane style, "Lost in Translation" is one of the most widely-anthologized poems in the English language. An incredibly elegant and incredibly complex meditation on memory, language, and family, written in the form of a story about putting a jigsaw puzzle, the poem is too lengthy to quote, but perhaps an excerpt from some of its opening lines will suffice to convey a glimmer of Merill's genius:
 +
 
 +
:A card table in the library stands ready
 +
:To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
 +
:Daylight shines in or lamplight down
 +
:Upon the tense oasis of green felt.
 +
:Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,
 +
:Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands
 +
:Or fallen piecemeal into place:
 +
:German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk
 +
:With the collie who "did everything but talk" —
 +
:Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us.
 +
:A summer without parents is the puzzle,
 +
:Or should be. But the boy, day after day,
 +
:Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle.  
  
== Awards ==
+
:Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York
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|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]]''.
+
:Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes —
 +
:A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn,  
 +
:Sandal-scented pieces. Many take
 +
:shapes known already — the craftsman's repertoire
 +
:nice in its limitation — from other puzzles:
 +
:Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
 +
:Even (not surely just in retrospect)
 +
:An inchling, innocently-branching palm.  
  
== Style ==
+
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 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 as 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."[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_merrill.html]
A writer of [[elegance]] and [[wit]], highly adept at wordplay and [[pun]]s, Merrill was a master of traditional [[meter (poetry)|poetic meter]] and [[Formalism|form]] who nevertheless produced significant quantities of [[free verse|free]] and [[blank verse|blank]] verse. Though not generally considered a [[Confessionalism (poetry)|Confessionalist]] poet, James Merrill made frequent use of personal relationships to fuel his "chronicles of love & loss" (as the speaker in ''[[Mirabell: Books of Number|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 [[Apocalypse|apocalyptic]] [[epic poetry|epic]] published as ''[[The Changing Light at Sandover]]'' (1982), documents two decades of messages dictated from otherworldly spirits during [[Ouija board|Ouija]] [[séance]]s hosted by Merrill and his partner [[David Jackson]]. ''The Changing Light at Sandover'' is one of the longest [[epic poetry|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."[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_merrill.html]  
+
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|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."[http://www.missouri.edu/~engtim/jm_forum/JMiowa.html]  
  
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|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."[http://www.missouri.edu/~engtim/jm_forum/JMiowa.html]
+
== 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'' 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''.
  
 
== Works by Merrill ==  
 
== Works by Merrill ==  
Line 39: Line 63:
 
*''The Fire Screen'' (1969)  
 
*''The Fire Screen'' (1969)  
 
*''Braving the Elements'' (1972)  
 
*''Braving the Elements'' (1972)  
*''[[Divine Comedies]]'' (1976), including "[[Lost in Translation (poem)|Lost in Translation]]" and ''[[The Book of Ephraim]]''  
+
*''Divine Comedies'' (1976), including "Lost in Translation" and ''The Book of Ephraim''  
*''[[Mirabell: Books of Number]]'' (1978)  
+
*''Mirabell: Books of Number'' (1978)  
 
*''Scripts for the Pageant'' (1980)  
 
*''Scripts for the Pageant'' (1980)  
*''[[The Changing Light at Sandover]]'' (1982)  
+
*''The Changing Light at Sandover'' (1982)  
 
*''From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976'' (1982)  
 
*''From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976'' (1982)  
*''[[Late Settings]]'' (1985)  
+
*''Late Settings'' (1985)  
*''[[The Inner Room]]'' (1988)  
+
*''The Inner Room'' (1988)  
 
*''Selected Poems 1946-1985'' (1992)  
 
*''Selected Poems 1946-1985'' (1992)  
*''[[A Scattering of Salts]]'' (1995)  
+
*''A Scattering of Salts'' (1995)  
 
*''Collected Poems'' (2001) ISBN 0-375-41139-9
 
*''Collected Poems'' (2001) ISBN 0-375-41139-9
  
Line 62: Line 86:
 
*''The Birthday'' (1947)  
 
*''The Birthday'' (1947)  
 
*''The Immortal Husband'' (1955)  
 
*''The Immortal Husband'' (1955)  
*''[[The Bait]]'' (1960)
+
*''The Bait'' (1960)
 
====Collection====
 
====Collection====
 
*''Collected Novels and Plays'' (2002) ISBN 0-375-41137-2
 
*''Collected Novels and Plays'' (2002) ISBN 0-375-41137-2
Line 68: Line 92:
 
==Works about Merrill==
 
==Works about Merrill==
 
* Stephen Yenser, ''The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill'' (1987)  
 
* Stephen Yenser, ''The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill'' (1987)  
* [[Alison Lurie]], ''[[Familiar Spirits]]: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson'' (2000)  
+
* Alison Laurie, ''Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson'' (2000)  
 
* ''James Merrill: Essays in Criticism'' (1983)  
 
* ''James Merrill: Essays in Criticism'' (1983)  
 
* Robert Polito, "A Reader's Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover" (1994)
 
* Robert Polito, "A Reader's Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover" (1994)

Revision as of 17:56, 11 September 2006

File:JamesMerrill.JPG
poet James Merrill, age 30, in a 1957 publicity photograph for The Seraglio.

James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, one of the most acclaimed American poets of his generation. Writing in the decades after World War II when literary Modernism had all but collapsed, Meriill's poetry—elegant, witty, and formally masterful—helped to chart the directions American poetry would take in the second half of the 20th-century. Like Auden or Yeats, Merrill was a master of traditional rhyme-and-meter who was also adept at writing in free verse, and his poems often phase in and out of strict and loose forms, creating poetry that is simultaneously modern and traditional. A major figure in the resurgence of poetic forms in the latter 20th-century, as well as an influential philanthropist who founded the Ingram Merill Foundation, Merrill is one of the most important American poets of the 20th-century.

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 which would be essentialy to the development of Merrill's urbane, worldly style.

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. 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 professor Kimon Friar published privately in Athens, Greece in 1946, was printed in just one hundred copies when Merrill was 20 years old. Considered to be Merrill's first mature work, The Black Swan is Merrill's scarcest title and is 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.

In 1955 Merill moved to Stonington, Connecticut. A year later, Merill purchased a home in Athens, Greece—Greek themes would become a frequent landmark in Merill's literary landscape—and for the next twenty years he would shuttle back and forth between the two residences. In spite of his immense inherted wealth, Merrill lived modestly, giving most of his money away (often anonymously) to support poets and writers in need of financial assistance. 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. The novelist Alison Laurie, a close friend of Merill, would write that during these years he was a "kind of Martian: supernaturally brilliant, detached, quizzical, apart."

Despite great personal wealth derived from unbreakable trusts made early in his childhood, Merrill lived humbly. A philanthropist, he created the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the name of which united his two 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.

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.

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 experiences 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. Easily Merrill's most famous work, and the finest example of his urbane style, "Lost in Translation" is one of the most widely-anthologized poems in the English language. An incredibly elegant and incredibly complex meditation on memory, language, and family, written in the form of a story about putting a jigsaw puzzle, the poem is too lengthy to quote, but perhaps an excerpt from some of its opening lines will suffice to convey a glimmer of Merill's genius:

A card table in the library stands ready
To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
Daylight shines in or lamplight down
Upon the tense oasis of green felt.
Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,
Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands
Or fallen piecemeal into place:
German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk
With the collie who "did everything but talk" —
Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us.
A summer without parents is the puzzle,
Or should be. But the boy, day after day,
Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle.
Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York
Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes —
A superior one, containing a thousand hand-sawn,
Sandal-scented pieces. Many take
shapes known already — the craftsman's repertoire
nice in its limitation — from other puzzles:
Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
Even (not surely just in retrospect)
An inchling, innocently-branching palm.

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 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 as 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]

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 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.

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)
  • Collected Poems (2001) ISBN 0-375-41139-9

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 (1960)

Collection

Works about Merrill

  • Stephen Yenser, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987)
  • Alison Laurie, Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson (2000)
  • James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983)
  • Robert Polito, "A Reader's Guide to The Changing Light at Sandover" (1994)
  • Reflected Houses (1986) audio recording
  • The Voice of the Poet: James Merrill (1999) Audio Book

Credits

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