Merrill's progress.(Column)

James Merrill's Collected Poems should be read at the rate the poems were published: a book every four years or so for forty-five years. (1) His language is so rich and elaborate that most of his works require a second reading at once, rewarding the effort more often than not. The poems cannot be consumed in bulk -- they need time for reflection, delectation, and, at first, forbearance. Discovering Merrill in this eight-hundred-page collection (which excludes his epic The Changing Light at Sandover), a newcomer might put down the heavy book because of its failures; failure blights the early works and the triumphs are slow to come. Yet we cannot wholly appreciate the splendor of Merrill's finest poetry without knowing its origins: it took this poet more than half his career to climb down the ladder of his rhetoric and lie down in what Yeats called "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

Of course no one much younger than sixty will ever know the excitement of reading Merrill in his time, discovering this poet in the history that is his and ours. Perhaps this matters less with him than with contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich, whose poetry so quickly showed its age. Early in his career, James Merrill (1926-1995) declared himself "an enemy of history" -- not in any political sense, but meaning that his art, like that of Mallarme and Stevens, was made to stand outside of time, and, while using history, might never be used by it.

I am fortunate in having discovered Merrill's poetry in 1967, soon after he won the National Book Award for his collection Nights and Days. It prompted me to read Water Street (1962), the first work of Merrill's maturity. I had ignored the earlier books, First Poems (1951) and A Country of a Thousand Tears of Peace (1959), which had established him as a writer of rare skill, a poet's poet with a coterie of devoted readers. Now, studying the early poems, I am impressed, above all, by the hard-earned progress of his apprenticeship, from a clever artificer of complex amusements to a poet of substance with passion to portray the world around him. His progress from narcissism to magnanimity was painful but certain.

By the late 1960s when the public discovered Merrill's poetry, the writer had only begun the trajectory that would culminate in the great works of his last years. Not everyone was pleased to see him win a prize. During the Vietnam era, there was an assault on rhetoric and artifice in poetry, mounted articulately by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, and cheered by a host of seductive semi-articulate disciples of Pound and Williams like Ed Dorn and Ted Berrigan. James Merrill, along with Howard Nemerov and Richard Wilbur, was considered the enemy. Of these poets, and others who soon gained notoriety for their "elegance" -- Mona Van Duyn, Richard Howard, and Anthony Hecht -- Merrill was the most mannered and artificial. In no respectable poet after 1950 do we find so many distortions of natural sentence structure to no purpose, not even the felicities of rhyme.

 
   From glade by river to a further day's 
   Thirst-crazed hilltop the abandoned cabin 
   Kept wandering like a mind. 
   (from "In Nine Sleep Valley") 

Many of Merrill's early poems do not sound even remotely like human speech. And though he eventually shed most of his fustian and filigree, he continued to be one of our most mannered and artificial poets until the end of his career.

The early poetry displays the fireworks of a prodigious technique: mastery of metrics and vowel tones, a painter's eye for rendering the complex image, and an allegorist's wit in transforming image to symbol, as in "The Broken Bowl."