James Merrill and W.H. Auden

James Merrill and W.H. Auden PDF Author: P. Gwiazda
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230607160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.

James Merrill and W.H. Auden

James Merrill and W.H. Auden PDF Author: P. Gwiazda
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230607160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.

The Changing Light at Sandover

The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Author: James Ingram Merrill
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
ISBN: 9780679747369
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
James Merrill's audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill's Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson--the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call "scribe") and DJ ("hand") are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B ("God Biology"), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world. The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair's gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, an utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer's role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill's tale of the joys and tragedies of man's powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry. --Alfred A. Knopf.

James Merrill

James Merrill PDF Author: Langdon Hammer
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375413332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Book Description
"A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--

A Whole World

A Whole World PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 110187550X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.

Collected Poems

Collected Poems PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 918

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Book Description
An essential addition to every shelf of 20-century poetry.

James Merrill and W.H. Auden

James Merrill and W.H. Auden PDF Author: P. Gwiazda
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403984319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.

Mirabell, Books of Number

Mirabell, Books of Number PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: New York : Atheneum, 1978, 1979 printing.
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Mirabell: Books of Number is a volume of poetry; the second of three books which together form the epic 560-page poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, which was published as a whole in 1982.

The Book of Ephraim

The Book of Ephraim PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520244
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.

A Scattering of Salts

A Scattering of Salts PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9780679765905
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Presents a collection of poetry in which the author transforms autobiographical insights and experiences into profound meditations on life and the world around him.

Merrill: Poems

Merrill: Poems PDF Author: James Merrill
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1101907851
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A beautiful hardcover selection of poems by one of the giants of contemporary American poetry. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS. James Merrill once called his body of work "chronicles of love and loss," and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life--comic and haunting, exotic and domestic--to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. Like Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden before him, Merrill sought to quicken the pulse of a poem in surprising and compelling ways--ways, indeed, that changed how we came to see our own lives. Years ago, the critic Helen Vendler wrote of Merrill, "He has become one of our indispensable poets." This volume brings together an entirely new pocket-sized selection of the best of Merrill's work. His poetry dazzles at every turn, and this balanced and compact selection will be an ideal introduction to the work for both students and general readers, and an instant favorite among his familiars.