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Zusatztext “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.” —Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995) wrote twelve books of poems, as well as the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover . He published two plays, two novels, and a memoir, A Different Person . The recipient of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, Merrill was also a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. LANGDON HAMMER is chair of the English Department at Yale University. His books include James Merrill: Life and Art and Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and he edited the Library of America voluems Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters and May Swenson: Collected Poems . A former Guggenheim fellow, he has written about poetry for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review , and The American Scholar , where he is poetry editor. Klappentext A beautiful hardcover selection of poems by one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS. James Merrill once called his body of work "chronicles of love and loss," and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life--comic and haunting, exotic and domestic--to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. 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 wrote of Merrill, "He has become one of our indispensable poets." This volume brings together an entirely new pocket-sized selection of the best of Merrill's work. His poetry dazzles at every turn, and this balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to the work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars. FOREWORD James Merrill is frequently viewed as a mandarin taste, a mid-twentieth-century Mallarme. He was happy to encourage this notion, and plenty of poems in this book support it. But this selection from his work also puts on view a surprisingly accessible poet who wrote short, funny, pointed poems that were topical and political in nature. It shows how gossipy and sociable he could be, how quotable, and, without ever giving up his irony and virtuosity, how full of honest feeling. The fact that Merrill treats his reader as a friend who already knows about his life – the raw material out of which he made his poems – is both charming and problematic. There is a disarming presumption of intimacy in his tone, but it’s easy to feel excluded since we are not after all his friends. Surely he must be speaking not to us but to some other audience of people as quick-witted and worldly as he . . . That impression diminishes, however, once we accept his invitation, get used to reading his poetry, and recognize its recurring characters and locations, themes and motifs. But it speeds up the process to learn a little about his biography. The story begins with his parents: Charles Merrill, co-founder of the mighty brokerage house Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a fashionable New Woman, smart, demanding, and intently focused on her only hild. His parents’ divorce in 1938 badly wounded the twelve-year-old boy. Merrill recalls the event in two of his often anthologized poems, ‘‘The Broken Home’’ and ‘‘Lost in Translation,’’ and it features in the background of many more, including the rollicking ballad cum adolescent sexual fantasy ‘‘Days of 1935.’’ But Merrill...
