James Merrill

James Ingram Merrill (3 March 1926 – 6 February 1995) was an American poet whose formally dazzling, autobiographically rich, and intellectually ambitious verse made him one of the supreme American poets of the twentieth century. His work ranges from exquisitely crafted short lyrics to the 560-page epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), dictated in part through a Ouija board — a work unlike anything else in American poetry. He won two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize.

Life

Merrill was born into extraordinary wealth — his father was Charles E. Merrill, co-founder of Merrill Lynch. He grew up in a world of privilege (a childhood home with forty-four rooms), but his parents’ bitter divorce when he was twelve marked him permanently. His poetry returns obsessively to childhood, loss, and the houses that embody both.

He attended Amherst College, served briefly in the Army, and published his first collection, First Poems (1951), at twenty-five. He lived for much of his life in Stonington, Connecticut — a small coastal village that appears throughout his poetry — and spent winters in Athens, Greece. He was openly gay from the early 1950s, living with his partner David Jackson for over thirty years. Jackson was his co-operator of the Ouija board that produced Sandover.

He died of a heart attack in Tucson, Arizona, at sixty-eight.

The Lyric Poetry

Merrill’s shorter poems — collected in volumes from Water Street (1962) through A Scattering of Salts (1995, posthumous) — are among the most accomplished lyrics in American poetry. They are characterised by:

• Formal virtuosity: Merrill was a master of traditional forms — sonnets, villanelles, terza rima, complex stanza patterns — but wore his formal skill lightly, so that the forms seem natural rather than imposed
• Social richness: Unlike the confessional poets (Lowell, Plath, Berryman), Merrill’s world includes other people — friends, lovers, neighbours, hosts. His poetry is social in a way that most American poetry is not
• Wit: Merrill was the wittiest serious American poet since Wallace Stevens. His puns, double meanings, and verbal play are not decorative but structural — they reveal connections between levels of meaning

Key collections include Nights and Days (1966, National Book Award), The Fire Screen (1969), Braving the Elements (1972, Bollingen Prize), and Late Settings (1985).

The Changing Light at Sandover (1982)

Merrill’s epic poem — 560 pages of verse dictated through a Ouija board operated by Merrill and Jackson in their Stonington dining room. The poem records conversations with the dead (W. H. Auden, Merrill’s friends and relatives), with angels, and with supernatural entities who reveal a cosmological system involving the creation and destruction of worlds, the nature of God, and the fate of the human soul.

The poem was published in three volumes — The Book of Ephraim (1976, embedded in Divine Comedies), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978, National Book Award), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980) — before being collected with a coda as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).

The question of whether Merrill “believed” in the Ouija board messages is beside the point. The poem uses the Ouija board as a compositional device — a way of accessing material that the conscious, waking mind cannot generate. The resulting poem is a genuine epic: it has the scope of Dante (the comparison is explicit and intentional), the conversational wit of Byron’s Don Juan, and a metaphysical ambition that no other American poem of the century attempts.

Critical Standing

Merrill is now recognised as one of the four or five most important American poets of the postwar era, alongside Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and A. R. Ammons. His reputation rests on both the shorter lyrics (which are formally perfect and emotionally rich) and Sandover (which is sui generis — there is nothing else like it).

His limitation, some critics argue, is that his world is narrow — the world of privilege, of beautiful houses, of European travel, of cultivated friendships. But within that world, Merrill achieved a depth and complexity that few poets in any language have matched.

Collecting Merrill

First Poems (1951, Knopf) in first edition is scarce, bringing $200–$500. The Changing Light at Sandover (1982, Atheneum) in first edition brings $50–$150. The individual Sandover volumes in first edition (Divine Comedies, Mirabell, Scripts for the Pageant) are collected as a set. Merrill signed at readings but was not a prolific signer.