Merrill, James (1926-1995), was an American poet whose favorite theme was memory. Many of Merrill’s poems evoke lost times and places, childhood fantasies, moments of intense feeling, dead friends and family, and dwellings that have been left behind. Merrill regarded the French novelist Marcel Proust as one of his chief inspirations. Like Proust, Merrill shows how past experience is transformed by recollection (see Proust, Marcel).
Merrill’s most ambitious effort to chart the transformations of time and loss comes in his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). A major portion of that volume was published earlier as part of Divine Comedies (1976), which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Another selection of poems was published as A Scattering of Salts (1995). Merrill’s Collected Poems (2001), Collected Prose (2004), and Selected Poems (2008) were published after his death. Merrill also wrote two novels and three plays, which were collected in Complete Novels and Plays (2002). In 2018, Merrill’s long poem “The Book of Ephraim” was published in a stand-alone volume, also called The Book of Ephraim. The work had originally been published as part of The Changing Light at Sandover. In The Book of Ephraim, Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, communicate over a Ouija board with the spirit Ephraim, dead friends, and famous poets. A collection of Merrill’s correpsondence called A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill was published in 2021.
Merrill’s poems are both entertaining and uniquely challenging because of their combination of complex rhyme schemes, sparkling images and metaphors, and ingenious word play. His poems are filled with surprising twists on familiar expressions, designed to make readers pay close attention to the words themselves. Merrill also wrote a prose memoir, A Different Person (1993). James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926. He died on Feb. 7, 1995.
