Collected Poems - Hardcover

James Merrill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411399 ISBN 13: 9780375411397

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

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 books: 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.

About this title

About the Author

James Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, in New York City and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950's 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 (1860); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued in 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.

From the Back Cover

"The lyrics in Merrill's Collected Poems ought to last as long as people still care about poetry . . . poetry as alive as Merrill's is why people care." — David Gates, Newsweek

"Gigantic and ravishing . . . What this new volume provides, not without a small shock even to those familiar with Merrill, is the size and scope of his accomplishment . . . [A] monumental new collection." — Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Times Book Review

"Merrill . . . has been well-served by his executors and editors, McClatchy and Yenser . . . [In this collection] there's more than enough—in humor and sorrow, in tones of voice, in diction, in subjects--to keep one engaged for days, for years, for life. Reading Merrill is like reading Marvell or Keats or Dickinson; having his lines in mind is that unique thing, a voice that says somebody was here before." —Caroline Fraser, L.A. Times

"The Collected Poems . . . sensitively edited by JD McClatchy and Stephen Yenser . . . represents a major literary event." — Edmund White, Out Magazine

"If you like poetry composed (in Hopkin's words) in 'the current language heightened,' Merrill will please you . . . If you have despaired of finding words subtle enough for all that goes on between lovers over time; if you are delighted by poetic invention, Merrill will please you. If you are eager for a window into the pangs and pleasures of gay existence, or if you want to know what a person of ever-attentive receptivity might have seen between 1926 and 1995, Merrill will please you. Above all, if you value lightness of touch, Merrill will please you . . . The weight of the wreath is heavy on all poets, but Merrill rarely allowed the weight to be felt, or the wrinkles to show." — Helen Vendler, The New Yorker

Reviews

Lauded at his death as a major American writer, a great poet of sociability and comedy, an important part of the gay literary tradition and a master of traditional forms, Merrill (1926-1995) is well-served by this monumental gathering off his shorter poems, carefully edited and likely to garner major attention and sales. McClatchy (Twenty Questions, etc.) is Merrill's literary executor, and Yenser the author of a Merrill monograph. They include Merrill's 11 trade volumes; poems from two small-press books, The Black Swan (1946) and The Yellow Pages (1974); 21 verse translations; and 45 poems retrieved from periodicals and manuscripts. Excluded are some juvenilia and light verse, as well as Merrill's book-length poem The Changing Light at Sandover, in print as a separate volume. Merrill's sonnets, sapphics, longer sequences and sinuous sentences encompass lyric pathos, ebullient comedy, rapt romance and acrid satire. Their formal sophistication can belie their depth of feeling, which is exactly what some readers love best about Merrill's work. New readers ought to skip the often-dry earliest books, begin with Merrill's 1960s works and read forward. Confirmed fans will no doubt flip to the end of the book, where they will encounter many poems for the first time--most are short and witty, many of them are fine. The poems from Merrill's last year can be arresting, including a self-elegy in which the dying poet thinks of himself as a Christmas tree. (Mar.) Forecast: Huge, career-summing reviews of this book are already in production at various typewriters and computers along the eastern seaboard. The story of Merrill's personal fortune has always made good copy, and revelations of the poet's death by AIDS in Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson (Viking), also due in March, should bring less-than-regular readers of poetry to the book via respectful items in glossies. Libraries of all stripes will also certainly acquire the book, which could show up on some bestseller lists.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Merrill's readers know that he was an exceptional poet in voice, vision, range, and fluency. The winner of many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and two National Book Awards, Merrill (1926-95) was gloriously prolific, as the editors of this bountiful collection, J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, attest. Here are all the poems, including translations, from 11 volumes (except for the epic The Changing Light at Sandover), as well as previously uncollected and unpublished works. There is much to absorb, mull over, and enjoy sensuously and intellectually. And it's profoundly moving to witness Merrill's evolution from the young author of The Black Swan (1946), drenched in yet wary of tradition, to the increasingly confident poet of the later books, who matched intensity with merriment and contrasted scenes from a life of privilege with a somber sense of history and loss. Like Stevens and Auden, Merrill was at once formal and conversational, lyric and narrative, and enlightened by the smallest of objects, a Willowware cup for instance, and the grandest: the sea, death, light. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

b o d y

Look closely at the letters. Can you see,
entering (stage right), then floating full,
then heading off — so soon —
how like a little kohl-rimmed moon
o plots her course from b to d

—as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?
Looked at too long, words fail,
phase out. Ask, now that body shines
no longer, by what light you learn these lines
and what the b and d stood for.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375411399
• ISBN 13: 9780375411397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 885
• Editor: J. D. McClatchy, Stephen Yenser