Name/Title
Collected Poems of James MerrillEntry/Object ID
2025.007.8Description
Upon its publication, James Merrill's "Collected Poems" was widely hailed as a landmark in American poetry, representing, as it does, a career whose assembled achievements "leave us dazed", in the words of his contemporary Anthony Hecht. Merrill's "First Poems" - its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once - appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, his 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." 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." 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 here, except for juvenilia and his epic, "The Changing Light at Sandover." In addition, twenty-one of his translations and forty-four of his previously uncollected poems are gathered here for the first time....this volume testifies 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.Collection
Local AuthorsBook Details
Author
Merrill, JamesEditor
McClatchy, J.D.Publisher
Alfred A KnopfDate Published
2001Call No.
920 MerrillISBN
0-375-70941-X