Nights and Days was published by Atheneum in 1966, and it won the National Book Award for Poetry — recognition that Merrill had achieved a new level of ambition and achievement. The collection marks the moment when Merrill moved beyond the elegant formalism of his early work (sometimes criticized as too decorative, too precious) toward a poetry that could accommodate the full range of his experience: love, loss, family, sexuality, travel, and the daily texture of a cultivated life.
The title poem is a sequence about insomnia and its revelations — what the mind discovers when it cannot sleep, when the defenses of daytime consciousness are lowered. Other major poems in the collection address his parents’ divorce (“The Broken Home”), his relationship with the Greek landscape and language (“Days of 1964”), and the peculiar combination of privilege and damage that characterized his childhood as the son of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch.
Merrill’s formal mastery is dazzling: he works in traditional forms (sonnets, villanelles, blank verse) with such ease that the constraint is invisible — the poems seem to flow naturally into their shapes rather than being forced into them. But the formal skill is now in service of emotional depth rather than mere elegance: these are poems that hurt, that reveal, that risk vulnerability.
Collecting Nights and Days
First edition (Atheneum, New York, 1966): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$40