Collected Poems

by James Merrill, Stephen Yenser (Editor), J.D. McClatchy (Editor)

The publication of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems —its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once—appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense—words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways—ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler spoke for others when she wrote of Merrill, "The time eventually comes, in a good poet's career, when readers actively wait for his to know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life . . . He has become one of our indispensable poets."

This book brings together a remarkable body of work in an authoritative edition. From Merrill's privately printed book, The Black Swan , published in 1946, to his posthumous collection, A Scattering of Salts , which appeared in 1995, all of the poems he published are included, except for juvenalia and his epic, The Changing Light at Sandover . In addition, twenty-one of his translations (from Apollinaire, Montale, and Cavafy, among others) and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems (including those written in the last year of his life) are gathered here for the first time.

Collected Poems in the first volume in a series that will present all of James Merrill's work—his novels and plays, and his collected prose. Together, these volumes will testify to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century and will continue to inspire readers and writers for years to come.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, American

885 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

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

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is never far from my bedside. I love Merrill best when I have insomnia and I'm up at three in the morning and everything's absolutely silent. He's a soft-spoken poet, and very companionable. Especially if you have the heebie jeebies in the middle of the night, he'll keep you from jumping out the window. LOves the small moments in life, appreciates its ironies, its shortcomings. Understands passion too, and resentment, and whimsies... His poem 'the Broken Home' is the place to begin. He was the son of Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith--just a little background.

[Robert Lashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The earlier the better, and the earlier isn’t as magical as his devotees say it is. Merrill never developed his voice past his dazzling early mimicries of Elizabeth Bishop and Hart Crane. I can see his love for bishop in the longer story poems, with their lush quasi surrealist imagery, and most of them are worth reading if only to see an individual picture of someone deal with his sexuality, moneyed heritage and time. However, where Bishop never intrudes in a narrative and the images she structures around it, Merrill almost always cuts in on a poem with his own voice. like a magician telling an audience the trick beforehand, he snatches the sense of the unexpected away.

And I have to speak my bias: I love Crane, just not the one Merrill and 96 percent of Crane fans love. I have a gladly worm copy of White Buildings in my library as we speak, but The Bridge, his long poem about America, is often bloated, ridiculous, and overwritten. When he lapses into a warmed over version of that Crane, Merrill has an ear of extravagant tin; and the more he became enamored with the big poem, the more he buried his genuine poetic gifts,

And If he buried his genuine poetic gifts early, he rocket tunneled them with his racial/sexual/eugenic polemic poems later in his life. When the reader gets to his dreams of an ideal society and who he wants/doesn't want in it, Merrill becomes many things: a right wing sprite, a national review militant, yet another violent drone in the culture wars we have fought in the twentieth century and beyond . The thing he stops being, however, is a poet, an artist, someone who has the potential make the reader see an aspect of humanity that hasn’t been seen before; and (intrinsic in the subject matter)the assortment of myths his later poems create and play upon never rise above some level of political boilerplate.

I would surmise that Merrill's devotee's would be aghast to be compared with Amiri Baraka's( And vice versa), but a close study shows both camps are whistling past rhetorical graveyards . Both men are not critiqued as much as they are worshiped: one would have a better outcome spitting at the pope in the Vatican than to remind a slam/ political poet about Baraka's works during his “genocide stage”; and from the number of people eager to step around Merrill's outbursts to crown him a saint shows that anyone who mutters a mumbling negative word toward him would suffer a similar backlash. Like millions of other human beings: both men found solace from their early internal agonies in fascist slogans, and the only major difference between the two is that Merrill's scan better. Which is part of human nature, an internal morality plays old as the histories that both men tried to reform into their own glory sagas. The only thing I can say about that they don't have a damm thing to do with what you need to know if you want to write a decent poem (or genuinely contribute to poetry in any way).

[Tom Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strangely difficult, but very rewarding poetry. My favorite collections included here are Water Street, Nights and Days, Braving the Elements, The Inner Room, and A Scattering of Salts. In these volumes Merrill effectively combines his remarkable ability with sound and his warm, avuncular voice. His content often involves snapshots of his life of leisure (beautiful things, beautiful places, and illustrious characters) that turn into ironic, elegant musings on time, love, and a life lived artistically. In the later poetry, he subtly grapples with writing about his AIDS and the melancholy strain throughout his poetry becomes slightly more pronounced. His voice is something like a late 20th-century Proust clad in dazzling, but always pleasantly light wit - a voice comparable to the fine kimonos he loved wearing and was buried in.

It can be hard to get the most out of reading his poetry, because it requires being in a very receptive, aesthetic mindset. I would like to come back to these poems when I'm older and I have less of a drive to "get through" literature, and more of the approach of a patient connoisseur. This goes especially for his earlier poetry, which can seem overly rarefied. But if you are in the right headspace - which is a valuable and rare place to be today - then his poems are endlessly rewarding.

I recommend his poem "The Victor Dog" as a place to start, a succinct ars poetica.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really regret not having discovered James Merrill until this autumn. This collection is...a delightful discovery. Finely crafted, erudite, gently melancholy, witty, alive to landscape and season and the ambiguities of love and time and loss. A lovely find.

[Kate Levin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out "The Emerald."

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merrill is a master, a sort of hidden secret among true devotees of poetry. For whatever reason, he hasn't completely snuck into the outer world, but the greatest critics of his time--Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom--were classing him with Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, and Crane. I'm willing to say that I think Merrill a great deal more enjoyable than those first two.

If you read this book, start with his first genuinely great volume of poetry, Water Street. If you make it to the end of A Scattering of Salts, circle back around. I'm particularly fond of The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace.

After that, it's like having beat the final boss in Pokémon--there are a lot of cutesy ephemera worth conquering--translations, previously uncollected poems, etc.--but it's not really necessary within the scope of the game itself. Check out the DLC, too, The Changing Light at Sandover!

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

ugh. merrill seems suspect to me. idk. it always feels like he’s talking down to the reader somehow. like he’s having me on or something. plenty of times I shook the book and hollered WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SAYING and I think he would’ve snickered - yes, snickered - and sipped his cocktail and refused to answer. the older he gets the worse it gets. the translations at the end were great tho

[Tanja Giljevic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of James Merrill before. His poetry is beautiful. I had to work to understand a lot of his references. I never had a classical education. It was worth it, though. I am almost finished his collection of letters.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Lost in Translation
By James Merrill

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

From this near thousand page collection of James Merrill’s poetry, I chose to read the poems selected from three of his books, each representing a different phase of his long career: Nights and Days (1966), Divine Comedies (1976) and A Scattering of Salts (1995). Overall, I feel Merrill is the rare poet who did not gain nor sustain his attention in the literary world because of his subject matter, but more so because of his linguistic abilities. The attention to sound, most evident in his innovative rhyming, was very impressive throughout each of the volumes I read. It is obvious that Merrill searched through his extensive vocabulary and knowledge of foreign languages to come up with word combinations such as “epaulettes/forgets” or “moods/loukoum/intrudes” (176-177) and it’s admirable that in these rhymes he combines high-brow and low-brow diction. However, it took him a long time to break free of the constraints of end-rhyming and shift the attention of his well-tuned ear to the more subtle art of slant and internal rhyme. This is one of the reasons that his later verse doesn’t feel as contemporary as it could have, even in the last volume where he finally shifted his subject matter to more modern experiences. Ultimately though, because he did choose to write personal lyrics throughout his career, I felt I could not completely ignore the content of his verse, which left much to be desired and may reveal why he became increasingly irrelevant in the 80’s and 90’s. I sense a searching in his poems to find oneself that never comes to resolution, and I think it contributed to why he faded from literary view in the times when identity and claiming a voice became very important in the poetry world.

[A.M. Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Always the black swan moves on the lake; always
The blond child stands to gaze
As the tall emblem pivots and rides out
To the opposite side, always. The child upon
The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays
Forever to cry aloud
In anguish: I love the black swan."

with Merrill, I initially preferred his early book, "the Black Swan", probably a symptom of my own less sophisticated tastes. His later work is urbane and witty, and has surprised me with each rereading. One word or one phrase suddenly reveals the underside of the thing. The series of poems entitled "Peter", for instance, are both clever and painful. The introduction to the book is good and includes some Merrill quotes such as "...he once told an interviewer, he 'looked for English in its billiard-table sense--words that have been set spinning against their own gravity.'" The Collected Poems is my most thumbed through book of poetry and I'm very frustrated that I wasn't able to find it in hardcover as I've destroyed it already.

[Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Merrill, who died in the 1990s, was a dazzling formalist and one of the great American lyric poets and elegists. His glittering rhymes are a constant source of delight and surprise, and his memoiristic meditations, “chronicles of love and loss,” are at times so witty that he seems to be the love child of Robert Lowell and Stephen Sondheim. Like Lowell, Merrill’s best poems are autobiographical, but he is too full with the love of world play to take himself over-seriously…even at their most painful, Merrill’s poems are always rescued from the maudlin by his keen sense of ironic detachment. Is this a particularly gay sensibility? Sometimes, Merrill can be so baroque as to be indecipherable, but his strongest verses are among the most moving poems I’ve ever read.

This collection, coupled with his indescribably brilliant Ouija Board epic “The Changing Light at Sandover” (published separately), represents one of the major modern poetic achievements.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

My leftist poet friends (yes, that's friends plural) accuse me of preferring fascist poets. My love for Merill is evidence for the prosecution. Guilty, then:

"Delicious, white, refined
Is all that I was raised to be,
Whom feeling for the word
Plus crystal rudiments of mind
Still keep -- however stirred --
From wholly melting in the tea.

...

The better to appraise his mess,
History's health freak begs
That such as we be given up.
Outpouring bitterness
Rewards the drainer of the cup...
He'll miss those sparkling dregs."

[Ian]

Merrill exhibits incredible poise as well as a fascinating wit. He also offers moments of question and darkness which offers new insight and awareness of the world around us. The book offers a complete collection of his work. The book is only lacking in that it offers no introduction or biography of Merrill, which I would have enjoyed. Still, it is a very powerful book.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merrill feeds my taste for formal, witty poems. Even some of the most serious poems like an "Urban Convalescence" start out with images that are fairly light hearted. With each reading they become richer and richer.

Overall, Merrill fits well with Auden and Wilbur.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is beautiful and interesting modern poetry. Makes me wish I was an English teacher again just for the joy of discussing and exchanging opinions about poetry. It's not the kind of thing that comes up much outside the context of the classroom setting.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been dabbling in this book for a while now...Merrill is great, because not only is he deft with meter & rhyme, but he's a little weirder and more surreal than, say, Frost or Lowell.

[Gregory Knapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best American poet of the second half of the 20th Century?

[Luca]

Beautiful language.

[Aroop Mitra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best American poet of the 20th century.