The Fire Screen was published by Atheneum in 1969, and it consolidates the breakthrough of Nights and Days while pushing further into autobiographical territory. The collection is dominated by poems set in Greece — Merrill spent much of the 1960s and 1970s living part-time in Athens — and by poems addressing erotic experience with a directness that was still unusual in American poetry.
The title poem establishes the collection’s central metaphor: a fire screen is a decorative object placed before a fireplace, simultaneously revealing and concealing the fire behind it. Art, Merrill suggests, functions similarly: it shows us passion, violence, desire — but always through a mediating screen that transforms raw experience into aesthetic object. The question implicit in the metaphor is whether this transformation is an enhancement (making experience more beautiful, more coherent) or a betrayal (domesticating what should remain wild, cooling what should remain hot).
Other major poems include “Mornings in a New House” (about establishing a life in a new home — specifically, the house in Stonington, Connecticut, where Merrill would live for decades), “The Summer People” (a narrative poem set in a Greek island community), and “Matinees” (about opera-going as a metaphor for emotional life). Throughout, Merrill’s formal control is absolute — these are poems of exquisite craftsmanship — but the emotional stakes are higher than in his early work.
Collecting The Fire Screen
First edition (Atheneum, New York, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25