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 Sandover are regarded as a major poetic statement, and Merrill as a metaphysical poet who employed both wit and charm.

Since his work first surfaced in 1955, James Merrill has been recognized as a master of poetic forms. He once explained in the New York Review of Books how he took "instinctively ... to quatrains, to octaves and sestets, when I began to write poems." His earliest works reflect the gentility of his upbringing as well as his eloquence and wit. But for all their technical virtuosity, the verses of The Black Swan and Other Poems (1946) and First Poems (1951) are largely static works, more concerned with objects than people. It was not until his themes became more dramatic and personal that he began to win serious attention and literary acclaim. Merrill received his first National Book Award for Nights and Days (1967), his second for Mirabell: Books of Number (1979). In the interim he won both the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1973) and the Pulitzer Prize (1977), the latter for a book of occult poetry called Divine Comedies. Such critical recognition, however, has not insured his popular appeal. Frequently, those who recognize his name at all know him only as "the Ouija poet"--one who composes with assistance from the spirit world.

Born into a wealthy New York family, James Merrill was privately educated in schools that placed a good deal of emphasis on poetry. His interest in language was also fired by his governess--a Prussian/English widow called Mademoiselle who was fluent in both German and French. She taught young James that English was merely one way of expressing things, while his parents encouraged his early efforts at verse. (His first book of poems was privately printed by his father--co-founder of the famous stockbrokerage known as Merrill Lynch--during James's senior year at Lawrenceville). When he was twelve, his parents divorced, his governess was discharged, and James was sent to boarding school. The diary he kept during a subsequent vacation to Silver Springs, Florida, included what, in retrospect, would prove to be a revealing entry: "Silver Springs--heavenly colors and swell fish."

Years later, in the New York Review of Books, Merrill explained how that statement reflected his feelings of loss and foreshadowed a major theme in his poetry. "`Heavenly colors and swell fish.' What is that phrase but an attempt to bring my parents together, to remarry on the page their characteristic inflections--the ladylike gush and the regular-guy terseness? In reality my parents have tones more personal and complex than these, but the time is still far off when I can dream of echoing them. To do so, I see in retrospect, will involve a search for magical places real or invented, like Silver Springs or Sandover [an imaginary setting in his mystical trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover].... By then, too, surrogate parents will enter the scene, figures more articulate than Mademoiselle but not unlike her, either, in the safe ease and mystery of their influence: Proust and Elizabeth Bishop; Maria [an old Athenian friend] and Auden in the Sandover books. The unities of home and world, and world and page, will be observed through the very act of transition from one to the other."

Such fusion of autobiography and archetype has become a hallmark of Merrill's verse, according to Andrew V. Ettin who writes in the Perspective, "The transformation of the natural, autobiographical, narrative events and tone into the magical, universal, sonorous, eternal is one of the principal characteristics of Merrill's poetry, perhaps the main source of its splendid and moving qualities." Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor William Spiegelman credits Merrill with discovering "what most lyric poets ... have yet to find: a context for a life, a pattern for presenting autobiography in lyric verse through the mediation of myth and fable."

Influenced not only by events, but also by the act of writing, Merrill, "with increasing awareness, courage and delight, has been developing an autobiography: `developing' as from a photographic negative which becomes increasingly clear," David Kalstone explains in the Times Literary Supplement. "He has not led the kind of outwardly dramatic life which would make external changes the centre of his poetry. Instead, poetry itself has been one of the changes, something which continually happens to him, and Merrill's subject proves to be the subject of the great Romantics: the constant revisions of the self that come through writing verse. Each book seems more specious because of the one which has come before."

While Merrill's verse abounds with details from daily life, Joseph Parisi notes in Poetry that it "never reeks of ego." Or, as Helen Vendler puts it in the New York Times Book Review, the best of Merrill's poems "are autobiographical without being `confessional': they show none of that urgency to reveal the untellable or unspeakable that we associate with the poetry we call `confessional'.... It is as though a curtain had been drawn aside, and we are permitted a glimpse of ... a life that goes on unconscious of us, with the narrator so perfectly an actor in his own drama that his presence as narrator is rendered transparent, invisible."

One of the ways Merrill achieves this stance is through the manipulation of meter and rhyme. "His mastery of forms, whether old or new, keeps his self revelatory poems (and some of them are painful) from the worst lapses of recent poets of the confessional school," X. J. Kennedy observes in the Atlantic Monthly. "Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, `all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.'"

Because they both wrote mystical poems, Yeats and Merrill have often been compared. Like Yeats, whose wife was a medium, Merrill receives inspiration from the world beyond. His Divine Comedies features an affable ghost named Ephraim who instructs the poet, while Yeats's "A Vision" features the spirit Leo Africanus in a similar role. Critics find other influences at work in Merrill's poems as well, drawing parallels between his writing and the work of Dante (whose Divine Comedy was the inspiration for Merrill's title), W. H. Auden (who, like Merrill, believed that poems are constructed of words, not emotions), and Marcel Proust (who was also dismissed as a mere aesthete early in his career).

In a Times Literary Supplement review, David Kalstone further explains how Proust's vision colors Merrill's world. "When he turned to narrative and social comedy, it was always with the sense--Proust's sense--that the world discerned is not quite real, that in its flashing action he might catch glimpses of patterns activated by charged moments of his life." Spiegelman believes that as "an heir to Proust, Merrill achieves a scope in poetry comparable to that of the major novelists: his great themes are the recovery of time (in spite of loss) through willed or automatic memory, and the alternating erosions and bequests of erotic experience. He focuses on what is taken, what abides, in love and time, and considers how to handle them."

But in his early poems, these concerns seldom surface. The verse of First Poems and The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems (1959) strikes reviewers as needlessly obscure, devoid of human passion, and removed from actual life. In his Babel to Byzantium, James Dickey writes that to read such poems is "to enter a realm of connoisseurish aesthetic contemplation, where there are no things more serious than gardens (usually formal), dolls, swans, statues, works of art, operas, delightful places in Europe, the ancient gods in tasteful and thought-provoking array, more statues, many birds and public parks, and, always, `the lovers,' wandering through it all as if they surely lived." Writing of this kind, continues Dickey, "has enough of [Henry] James's insistence upon manners and decorum to evoke a limited admiration for the taste, wit, and eloquence that such an attitude makes possible, and also enough to drive you mad over the needless artificiality, prim finickiness, and determined inconsequence of it all."

In 1959, when Merrill began spending six months of each year in Athens, his poetry took on some of the warmth and intimacy of the old Greek culture. And, as the poems became more personal, they also became more accessible, although their appeal was still limited, as Ian Hamilton explains. "Even though (with Water Street in 1962) he had toughened and colloquialized his verse line and eliminated much of the wan artifice that marked his very early work, there was still--in his usual persona--a delicate strain of yearning otherworldliness, a delicate discomfiture which was neither neurotic nor ideological. His was a poetry of, and for, the few--the few kindred spirits," Hamilton writes in the Washington Post Book World.

With each step he took away from rigid formalism, Merrill gained critical ground. Unwilling to restrict his choice and assembly of language, he nevertheless progressed toward a more conversational verse reminiscent of the structure of prose. "The flashes and glimpses of `plot' in some of the lyrics--especially the longer poems--reminded Merrill's readers that he wanted more than the usual proportion of dailiness and detail in his lyrics, while preserving a language far from the plainness of journalistic poetry, a language full of arabesques, fancifulness, play of wit, and oblique metaphor," writes Helen Vendler in the New York Review of Books. In fact, Merrill tried his hand at both plays and novels and considered writing his epic poem "The Book of Ephraim" as a prose narrative. He abandoned the idea, for reasons that he explains in the poem: "The more I struggled to be plain, the more / Mannerism hobbled me. What for? / Since it had never truly fit, why wear / The shoe of prose? In verse the feet went bare."

It was "The Book of Ephraim"--which appeared in Divine Comedies-- that prompted many critics to reevaluate the poet. Among them was Harold Bloom, who wrote in the New Republic: "James Merrill ... has convinced many discerning readers of a greatness, or something like it, in his first six volumes of verse, but until this year I remained a stubborn holdout. The publication of Divine Comedies ... converts me, absolutely if belatedly, to Merrill.... The book's eight shorter poems surpass nearly all the earlier Merrill, but its apocalypse (a lesser word won't do) is a 100-page verse-tale, "The Book of Ephraim," an occult splendor in which Merrill rivals Yeats' `A Vision,' ... and even some aspects of Proust."

William Spiegelman agrees. Describing Divine Comedies as "Merrill's supreme fiction, a self-mythologizing within an epic program," he observes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: "At last Merrill's masters combine with graceful fluency in a confection entirely his own: the reader finds Proust's social world, his analysis of the human heart and the artist's growth; Dante's encyclopedia of a vast universal organization; and Yeats's spiritualism, for which the hints in the earlier volumes gave only small promise. Added to these are the offhand humor of Lord Byron and W. H. Auden, a Neoplatonic theory of reincarnation, a self-reflexiveness about the process of composition, and a virtual handbook of poetic technique. `The Book of Ephraim,' the volume's long poem, is chapter one of Merrill's central statement."

The two volumes that follow--Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) and Scripts for the Pageant (1980)--continue the narrative that "The Book of Ephraim" begins. Together these three poems form a trilogy that was published with a new coda in The Changing Light at Sandover (1983). This unprecedented 560-page epic records the Ouija board sessions that Merrill and David Jackson, his lifelong companion, conducted with spirits from the other world.

Appropriately, Merrill has organized each section of the trilogy to reflect a different component of their homemade Ouija board. The twenty-six sections of "The Book of Ephraim" correspond to the board's A to Z alphabet, the ten sections of Mirabell: Books of Number correspond to the board's numbering from 0 to 9, and the three sections of Scripts for the Pageant ("Yes," "&," and "No") correspond to the board's Yes & No. The progression of poems also represents a kind of celestial hierarchy, with each book representing communication with a higher order of spirits than the one before. (Humans in the poem are identified by their initials--DJ and JM; spirits speak in all capitals.) By the time Merrill transcribes the lessons of the archangels in book three, he has been offered nothing less than a model of the universe. "Were such information conveyed to us by a carnival `spiritual adviser,' we could dismiss it as mere nonsense," observes Fred Moramarco in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "but as it comes from a poet of Merrill's extraordinary poetic and intellectual gifts, we sit up and take notice."

In the first book, Merrill's guide is Ephraim, "a Greek Jew / Born AD 8 at XANTHOS," later identified as "Our Familiar Spirit." Over a period of twenty years and in a variety of settings, Ephraim alerts DJ and JM to certain cosmic truths, including the fact that "on Earth / We're each the REPRESENTATIVE of a PATRON" who guides our souls through the nine stages of being until we become patrons for other souls. Witty, refined, full of gossip, Ephraim is "a clear cousin to Merrill's poetic voice," Kalstone says in the Times Literary Supplement.

Other spirits also appear in the poem, many of them family members or old friends who have died: Merrill's mother and father, the young poet Hans Lodeizen (whose death Merrill addressed in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace), the Athenian Maria Mitsotaki (a green-thumbed gardener who died of cancer), as well as literary figures such as W. H. Auden and Plato. They form a community, according to Ephraim, "WITHIN SIGHT OF & ALL CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER DEAD OR ALIVE NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT HEAVEN IS IT IS THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING." As Helen Vendler explains in the New York Review of Books, "The host receives his visible and invisible guests, convinced that ... the poet's paradise is nothing other than all those beings whom he has known and has imagined." For this reason, Vendler maintains that "The Book of Ephraim" is "centrally a hymn to history and a meditation on memory--personal history and personal memory, which are, for this poet at least, the muse's materials."

Aware of the incredulity his spiritualism will provoke, Merrill addresses this issue early in book one: "The question / Of who or what we took Ephraim to be / And of what truths (if any) we considered / Him spokesman, had arisen from the start." Indeed, Vendler says, "for rationalists reading the poem, Merrill includes a good deal of self-protective irony, even incorporating in the tale a visit to his ex-shrink, who proclaims the evocation of Ephraim and the other Ouija `guests' from the other world a folie a deux [mutual madness] between Merrill and his friend David Jackson."

In a Poetry review, Joseph Parisi suggests that Merrill uses "his own doubt and hesitation to undercut and simultaneously to underscore his seriousness in recounting ... his fabulous ... message. Anticipating the incredulity of `sophisticated' and even cynical readers, the poet portrays his own apparent skepticism at these tales from the spirit world to preempt and disarm the attacks, while making the reader feel he is learning the quasi-occult truths ... along with the poet."

As the experience proceeds, Merrill's skepticism declines. And while the reader's may not, Judith Moffett suggests in the American Poetry Review that disbelief is not the issue: "Surely any literary work ought to be judged not on its matter but on the way the matter is presented and treated ... The critical question, then, should be not Is this the story he ought to have told? but How well has he told this story?" Moffett, as well as numerous other critics, believes Merrill has told it very well: "`The Book of Ephraim' is a genuinely great poem--a phrase no one should use lightly--and very possibly the most impressive poetic endeavor in English in this century."

In book two, Ephraim is overshadowed by a band of bat-like creatures who "SPEAK FROM WITHIN THE ATOM," demanding "POEMS OF SCIENCE" from JM. These are the fallen angels whose task is now to mind the machinery put in motion by God Biology, whose enemy is Chaos. Their request appears on the board: "FIND US BETTER PHRASES FOR THESE HISTORIES WE POUR FORTH / HOPING AGAINST HOPE THAT MAN WILL LOVE HIS MIND & LANGUAGE." As poet, Merrill serves as a vehicle for divine revelation, and, by tapping his "word bank," the bats can combat Chaos. They explain: "THE SCRIBE SHALL / SUPPLANT RELIGION, & THE ENTIRE APPARATUS / DEVELOP THE WAY TO PARADISE." (At another point, Merrill learns that he was chosen to receive this vision in part because of his homosexuality: he will devote his energies not to children, but to art.)

God Biology's chief messenger is a spirit initially identified as 741, who Merrill names Mirabell. Mirabell warns of the two major threats to man's existence: overpopulation and nuclear power. In passages that almost all critics consider elitist, Mirabell explains that there are only two million enlightened souls in the world. The rest are inferior animal souls who reproduce prolifically and into whose hands atomic weaponry now threatens to fall. Too little given to reason and restraint, these souls allow Chaos to gain ground.

While acknowledging that "one can see the intricate rationale of such statements in the context of Mirabell's general themes," Joseph Parisi maintains that readers "may be uncomfortable with the elitism which is implicit, and ultimately counterproductive, if indeed the poem pretends to enlighten and to teach.... For all the charm of Mirabell' small circle of friends, some may be put off by their blithe air of superiority, as others may be by the High Tea (not to mention Camp) atmosphere of the Heavenly get-togethers." Stephen Spender agrees, pointing out in the New York Review of Books that "this reader sometimes feels that Merrill's heaven is a tea party to which he is not likely to be invited because he will not understand the `in' jokes." Remarks Moffett: "By portraying intelligent poetic and musical gays as the evolutionary creme de la creme, Merrill makes himself vulnerable to charges of narcissism; the same could be said of passages in which heaven lavishes praise upon its spokesmen." But, "to be fair," says Edmund White, "I should point out that the fault lies not in Merrill, but in his bats; they are the ones who portray the hierarchical system. He is merely their scribe."

One of the duties of the bats, Merrill explains in the Kenyon Review, is to prepare him and David for "a seminar with the angels--whose 25 lessons are in fact the marrow of the third volume." While the poet here confronts essential questions about the mystery of creation, the structure of the universe, and the fate of man, some critics find the final message of Scripts for the Pageant in its organizing principle, "Yes & No." Charles Molesworth explains in the New Republic that "taken serially, these three words form irreducible language acts, namely assertion, qualification, and denial. Taken all together, they form the essence of equivocation, which can be seen as either the fullest sort of language act or the very subversion of language." By characterizing his acceptance of the spirits' wisdom in terms of "Yes & No," Merrill "transforms the poem into a hymn celebrating, among other things, `resistance' as `Nature's gift to man,'" Mary Jo Salter writes in the Atlantic Monthly. As the myth is reappraised and corrected by the characters who are themselves a part of it, Salter believes that "`Yes & No' becomes an answer to every question: not an equivocation of authorial (or divine) responsibility, but an acknowledgement that `fact is fable,' that the question of man's future, if any, is one he must answer for himself."

By the time Scripts for the Pageant ends, Merrill has made clear his vision of the self as a story that unfolds over time. During one lesson, the angels discuss two previous races of creatures who were destroyed. Afterwards, Merrill, to use Molesworth's words, "advances a set of parallels between the account of the two earlier races and his own childhood, as he was preceded by two siblings and his parents divorced while he was still a child. Autobiography and creation myth: by hinting they're the same Merrill deals with a key modernist, and a key American theme."

Molesworth concludes that "five years ago, Merrill hoped to be measured by Auden and Stevens; now his work asks comparison with that of Yeats and Blake, if not Milton and Dante. But the clearest analogue may be that of Byron, who, desiring a scale both intimate and grand, yet wanting a hero, decided to fill the role himself."

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of James Merrill (1926-1995)
• At the time of Merrill's birth:
• Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States
• Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" published
• Hart Crane's "White Buildings" published
• Painters Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt died
• Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel
• At the time of Merrill's death:
• Bill Clinton was President of the United States
• Popular films were "Apollo 13" with Tom Hanks and "Braveheart" with Mel Gibson
• United States established diplomatic relations with Vietnam
• Rita Dove's "Mother Love" published
• The times:
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• Merrill's contemporaries:
• James Baldwin (1924-1987) American writer
• Edward Albee (1928-) American playwright
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-) Mexican writer
• Maya Angelou (1928-) American writer
• Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) American playwright
• Toni Morrison (1931-) American novelist
• Selected world events:
• 1927: Charles Lindbergh made first nonstop solo flight across Atlantic
• 1930: William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" published
• 1936: Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" published
• 1945: Television was licensed for commercial use in the U.S
• 1947: Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" published
• 1960: Harper Lee's "To Kill an Mockingbird" published
• 1969: Woodstock Music and Art Festival was held in Upstate New York
• 1976: U.S. celebrated Bicentennial
• 1983: Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" published
• 1995: Rita Dove's "Mother Love" published

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.