Late Settings

by James Merrill

Brief poems deal with nature, creativity, changing landscapes, city life, class structure, the sea, drama, history, religion, and memory

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

James Ingram Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950s on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Sam]

Picture this: you meet Merrill at a party, right? And because it’s Merrill, you meet him at a rooftop villa in Greece, and it’s dusk, and you’re eating grape leaves and drinking red wine. Merrill is sparklingly witty. Well-traveled. Urbane. He tells a wonderful story about an evening at the opera, another about a Parisian art dealer, and a third about an Egyptian (oh, how exotic) imam who runs the Cairo Backgammon Society. Eventually it’s him and you at a railing overlooking the town. You get to talking. You talk. He leaves to make nice with other people as they leave. And you get the sense - gentle, sinking, but the definite sense - that Merrill thinks that he’s done a great generosity by deigning to talk to you for twenty minutes and no one could ever be as smart, good-looking, or cultured as he is. It doesn’t make you feel good. You wish you hadn’t realized it. But now you have...

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book by a great poet!

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who's a better 20th Century post-war poet than Merrill?