None of us can shine all the time, but now and then a nonpareil comes along who puts on a good show of inexhaustible radiance. America lost one such rare soul last week when James Merrill died of a heart attack at the age of 68. He was a novelist, an essayist and a playwright, but it’s as a poet-the author of 11 volumes of verse, with a 12th forthcoming in March-that he made his ineradicable mark.
If he was, as the son of a founding partner of Merrill Lynch, an unlikely poet, that’s a condition he shared with Wallace Stevens the insurance executive and William Carlos Williams the obstetrician; American poetry has a healthy tradition of culling its favorite sons and daughters from unexpected niches. Merrill attended Amherst College, but his education was interrupted by a year of military service in Europe in 1944. A mere World War, though, and the tumultuous love affairs he also endured, were hardly sufficient to deflect his sense of purpose. Year by year, with ferocious industry, he added to his glittering shelf of books.
As a poet, he had the advantage of seeming never to have had to serve an apprenticeship. There would be something almost chilling, if it weren’t so cheering, about the ease with which, at 20, he negotiated the considerable challenges of rhyme and meter he set for himself. Of course he belonged to a generation of surpassing formal accomplishment. That fertile decade of his birth-the 1920s-also gave us Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Howard Moss, Amy Clampitt, Howard Nemerov. But as a craftsman he exceeded them all-in the thrill of the unexpected, anyway. Indeed, more than any American poet ever (with the possible exception of Marianne Moore), he conveyed an infectious, exuberant joy in sheer building.
Merrill was gleefully eclectic: he wrote sonnets and sestinas and haikus and epigrams; he worked in heroic couplets and terza rima and the Rubaiyat stanza. But he was perhaps most himself when fabricating his own unorthodox verse forms. He was a born matchmaker, tirelessly contriving a happy marriage of form and content, and the result was a heady range of tonal variations. A Merrill poem might begin like this:
Stranger, look down (the jingle said) & you Will see the face of one who loves you true.
Or like this:
Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez, The little white dog on the Victor label Listens long and hard as he is able. It’s all in a day’s work, whatever plays.
Or like this swatch of light verse:
U cn gt a gd jb w hi pa! So thinks a sign in the subway.
For poets drawn to rhyme and meter, Merrill was a source of inspiration and intimidation-a salutary reminder that a poem’s “finish” is rarely finished. Among those for whom formal verse seemed passa, he was accorded a notably ungrudging respect: there was simply no gainsaying his mastery, his seriousness, his artistic probity.
His penchant for understatement may help explain his ability to satisfy so wide an audience. He was a master of the graceful exit, the teasing diminuendo. He had a fondness for half-concealing his cleverest effects, so that you might have to read a poem two or three times before you detect the rhyme of “dirigible” with “unmarriageable” or “rosy” with “Mafiosi.” Dexterity was simply one of the givens of his work-as was his erudition, his homosexuality, his wealth, his cosmopolitan life.
Merrill spent many years in Greece, and there’s an overbrimming sunniness (“There at the highest trumpet blast/ Of Fahrenheit”) in much of his poetry, particularly in his early books: with polychromatic warmth and humor he captures lovers, society ladies, fortune-tellers, merchants, children. In recent years he registered more moon than sun perhaps, in poems bathed in a blue, chilly and at times merciless light. Merrill wrote beautifully-painfully-about the daily diminutions of the body and the passing of friends, about aids, alcoholism and senility.
Under sun and moon-in all weathers-he went on constructing, a process whose natural culmination was his vast phantasmagoria The Changing Light at Sandover, an epic poem stretching over three volumes and chronicling extended conversations with the illustrious dead, whom Merrill summoned by Ouija board. He has gone on to become one of them, leaving behind the paradoxical legacy of a man who loved both understatement and sumptuosity, nicety and grandeur. In the end, his contradictions were expansive. Collectively the poems declare, Here’s a world, and it’s a good one.
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