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James Merrill: Life and Art
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art.
After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored “boys and bars” as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's “chronicles of love & loss” and the poignant personal journey they record.
After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored “boys and bars” as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's “chronicles of love & loss” and the poignant personal journey they record.
944 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
July 24, 2015
Independently wealthy--his father was one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch--James Merrill didn't need to work. Possessing a gift for poetry and language, he wrote without the need to subsidize his writing through teaching or editing or any other kind of employment. Yet he spent almost every day of his adult life in disciplined, hard work at his desk writing mostly poetry but also a couple of novels, a memoir, and a handful of plays. Langdon Hammer's is a critical biography which discusses the work in detail. He tells us that much of it was autobiographical. Merrill was a formal poet, always working in some traditional structure and rhyme. His long daily hours at his desk paid off. He was recognized during his life as a poet of brilliance and elegance. He published 15 individual volumes of poetry but is probably best known for The Changing Light at Sandover, the trilogy based on sessions he and David Jackson spent at a Ouija board.
David Jackson was his lover for 40 years or more. Merrill was gay, an orientation understood by him from an early age. Hammer writes comprehensively of Merrill's gay life beginning in the years when homosexuality was misunderstood, stigmatized, and even illegal through the years of gradual acceptance and the AIDS epidemic. In fact, Merrill died of the disease. Hammer's narrative of the life fully incorporates what it meant to be a gay man during his lifetime, 1926-1995. The fact of his homosexual lifestyle and its importance in how he lived his life and how it affected his work is a major focus in the biography. Another is his huge network of friends which included Alice B. Toklas, W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Bishop, and Larry Rivers. Merrill's friendship with each of them and others give Hammer the opportunity to write engagingly about almost everyone who knew Merrill and the nature of the friendship.
Life and art. A life in art. The biography of a major American poet where life as a gay man seems to be emblematic of gay life in America during the 2d half of the 20th century, it's also a work in which the chronicle of a life spanning so much of the century shines a light on many of the social and cultural events of our time. In the tradition of all-inclusive biographies of writers, Langdon Hammer's life of Merrill is an embodiment of the form.
David Jackson was his lover for 40 years or more. Merrill was gay, an orientation understood by him from an early age. Hammer writes comprehensively of Merrill's gay life beginning in the years when homosexuality was misunderstood, stigmatized, and even illegal through the years of gradual acceptance and the AIDS epidemic. In fact, Merrill died of the disease. Hammer's narrative of the life fully incorporates what it meant to be a gay man during his lifetime, 1926-1995. The fact of his homosexual lifestyle and its importance in how he lived his life and how it affected his work is a major focus in the biography. Another is his huge network of friends which included Alice B. Toklas, W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Bishop, and Larry Rivers. Merrill's friendship with each of them and others give Hammer the opportunity to write engagingly about almost everyone who knew Merrill and the nature of the friendship.
Life and art. A life in art. The biography of a major American poet where life as a gay man seems to be emblematic of gay life in America during the 2d half of the 20th century, it's also a work in which the chronicle of a life spanning so much of the century shines a light on many of the social and cultural events of our time. In the tradition of all-inclusive biographies of writers, Langdon Hammer's life of Merrill is an embodiment of the form.
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April 28, 2019A titanic effort by a great writer. Langdon Hammer was insightful, sprinkling his book with readings of James Merrill's poetry and giving the author's work context within his life. Which is crucial with this poet, since most of his work is autobiographical to a point where it is difficult to understand many of his poems without some knowledge of his life. Hammer is eloquent without being precious or pretentious, and brings Merrill himself and the people most important to him--his mother, Hellen Plummer; his two major loves, David Jackson and Peter Hooten; his many writer friends, Elizabeth Bishop, especially; and many others--to life like a firsthand account of the events he reports. James Merrill was outgoing; sociable; was always around other people; traveled all the time and to many places, living in Greece periodically; was witty, filling his letters and diaries just as much as his poems with witty plays on cliches and wordplay; and also very generous with his fabulous wealth, and these permeate every page of the biography. It feels like Hammer wrote Merrill’s whole world and its atmosphere into this work. This is something that I will return to time and again when I need help reading one of Merrill's poems, whether to consult one of Hammer's discussions of a poem or just to read about the event Merrill writes about in a poem. Anyone interested in this author's life and work should read this.
April 22, 2019
This book has been a part of my life for four months, and I am going to miss it. It was the perfect way to read it, too, because that way James Merrill and his poetry seeped into my own life and enriched it.
It now feels weird that six months ago I had never heard of him. I first encountered his poems in “Love speaks its name“, and something about his poems made me get both „Sandover”, his collected poems and this biography. I don’t think this is the kind of book you read in one go - it’s exhaustive, but I have no doubt that feels exhausting when reading it as a whole rather than split in short chunks. Split like that, it was highly enjoyable because of its details.
Apart from telling James Merrill’s “life story” (which is fascinating on its own), this book does a great job illuminating Merrill’s poems, which were very much influenced by his experiences. The chapters on “Sandover” were probably my favorites, but I liked the way Hammer included and interpreted poems throughout the text.
For me, this book was an unexpected pleasure, and an immense one at that. While not everyone may experience this book the way I did, I hope everyone who likes to read finds books like this one; books that reshape your mind and widen your horizons as well as touch your heart and soul.
It now feels weird that six months ago I had never heard of him. I first encountered his poems in “Love speaks its name“, and something about his poems made me get both „Sandover”, his collected poems and this biography. I don’t think this is the kind of book you read in one go - it’s exhaustive, but I have no doubt that feels exhausting when reading it as a whole rather than split in short chunks. Split like that, it was highly enjoyable because of its details.
Apart from telling James Merrill’s “life story” (which is fascinating on its own), this book does a great job illuminating Merrill’s poems, which were very much influenced by his experiences. The chapters on “Sandover” were probably my favorites, but I liked the way Hammer included and interpreted poems throughout the text.
For me, this book was an unexpected pleasure, and an immense one at that. While not everyone may experience this book the way I did, I hope everyone who likes to read finds books like this one; books that reshape your mind and widen your horizons as well as touch your heart and soul.
April 29, 2015
Mr. Hammer's work is brilliant but in need of some serious liposuction.
**Goodreads prize**
**Goodreads prize**
June 11, 2024
A wonderful biography of a great poet.
June 27, 2021
Hammer's biography of Merrill provides a detailed look at the life and work of the poet. It is a comprehensive look at who he knew and all those he interacted with, which at times made for a complicated read. The sheer size and scale of Hammer's work made it difficult to always follow who he was discussing. While I wanted to finish the book, the sheer depth of the study made it at times hard to read.
"Merrill found the city ravishing: with its "peeling paint, rubbed gold, [and] stone consumed by water," it was like "a vast theatre abandoned after a pageant of Venice; to the estate of an 18th century eccentric whom, even while he was alive, none of his guests ever saw." 130
"Before new drugs in the 1990s made it possible for people to live with the disease, AIDS introduced a strange temporality. Men died before their tome. So certain did fatality seem, the ill were in a sense dead already, even while they lived on." 705
"Perhaps the greatest psychic horror of AIDS for a culture that always segregates and shifts death elsewhere," writes the critic Tim Dean, "is the way AIDS intertwines death with life-and what is generally assumed to be the life force: the sex drive." 715
"Merrill found the city ravishing: with its "peeling paint, rubbed gold, [and] stone consumed by water," it was like "a vast theatre abandoned after a pageant of Venice; to the estate of an 18th century eccentric whom, even while he was alive, none of his guests ever saw." 130
"Before new drugs in the 1990s made it possible for people to live with the disease, AIDS introduced a strange temporality. Men died before their tome. So certain did fatality seem, the ill were in a sense dead already, even while they lived on." 705
"Perhaps the greatest psychic horror of AIDS for a culture that always segregates and shifts death elsewhere," writes the critic Tim Dean, "is the way AIDS intertwines death with life-and what is generally assumed to be the life force: the sex drive." 715
August 14, 2015
Deep, What a life... The people he knew... the places he lived... the men he loved...a consummate poet... 20th century more than Whitman than Yeats, than Auden... equal to and close and kindred spirit of Elizabeth Bishop.
This is a must read for anyone that lives for writing and Poetry and the Arts.
Also a long coming out story into the AIDS decades...
This is a must read for anyone that lives for writing and Poetry and the Arts.
Also a long coming out story into the AIDS decades...
March 15, 2019
A comprehensive guide to the life of an artist dedicated to the expression of reflected perspective. Hammer does an excellent job elucidating the 'truth' around THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER, a work that still marvels readers to this day.
May 8, 2024
In this exemplary biography, with its admirably thorough scholarship and engaging narrative, Hammer tells of the life and work of one of the greatest American poets of the last century. Born to wealth and sent to elite schools, Merrill had the financial stability and the leisure to devote his life principally to the writing of poetry, though he also tried an unsuccessful novel and a no more successful play. Merrill had so schooled himself in the work of earlier poets that he became a master, quite early on, of demanding, highly disciplined poetic structures, though some critics felt that this early poetry, while obviously accomplished, was too focused on showing off his mastery of formal techniques and of overprecious words that appeared mainly in poetry. Merrill soon added to that formal skill poetic reflections, to a courageous psychological depth, on the emotional pressures of his childhood and of his life as a gay man. Moving between homes in Stonington, Connecticut and Athens, he had a lifetime partner (David Jackson) and an intensely romanticized Greek lover (Strato), as well as other lovers. He came to produce superbly skilled and emotionally powerful poems of a few hundred lines, such as “Lost in Translation,” “Verse for Urania,” “Losing the Marbles,” “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” “Nine Lives,” “Days of 1971,” “Clearing the Title,” and many others. In “Lost in Translation,” a poem that has to be included in any anthology of great American poems, the adult poet in Athens is comparing putting together the word-pieces and images of a poem to his young self of twelve putting together an orientalist jigsaw puzzle that suggests, unbeknownst to the boy, the divorce his parents are going through. In the poem the translation from French to German, by Rilke, of a poem by Valéry hints at several other translations in the poet’s life. One can ultimately read the poem as a brilliant reflection on the role that art, even its most formal elements, can play in helping to order one’s psyche so that the painful happenings of ordinary life can be appropriated in a more satisfying manner. One is able, through art, to give a sustaining style and rhythm to the difficult intrusions of experience, especially those having to do with profound loss.
At the same time as he was writing that poem, Merrill began writing his lengthy poetic trilogy in which he reflected on large questions about the future of human life on the planet. He did so, oddly enough, through the use of a Ouija board that he used to communicate with the spirits of the dead, especially recently dead poets and friends such as Auden and a character from the ancient Hellenist world called Ephraim. (Merrill seems to have had the kind of negative capability that allowed him both to believe and not to believe that he was actually communicating with a higher spiritual order that was using him and his poetry to communicate necessary truths to mankind.) The first poem in the trilogy is frequently autobiographical and contains superb, moving poetry. The other two poems are more controversial. They are extremely long, with stronger messages from the other world about dangers to the human race and with Merrill seeming to take far too seriously every single New Age fad of the 1970s, from Stonehenge to the pyramids, as if these were partial vehicles for the relations of the spirit world to the earth. At the same time he tries unconvincingly to give a kind of scientific credibility to this work through a metaphorical exploitation of many findings in physics, such as the theory of black holes. Merrill seems to believe that an elite group of poets and artists must work now to raise the spiritual level of the planet in order to save it. That elitism occasionally allows for disturbing hints of racism in his decisions about who might belong to this elite.
Putting those two long poems aside (Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant) Merrill’s reputation as a great American poet is made fully secure by perhaps a hundred brilliant poems that combine unsurpassed formal technique with deeply moving meditations on how an individual life ultimately comes to have the shape that it does. After Merrill, who died from complications of AIDS in 1995, the inclusion in poetry of highly detailed reporting on the emotional vicissitudes of an individual gay life can be taken for granted as hardly remarkable. Hammer’s is one of the great biographies of recent decades.
For further writing on topics and books like this one, see my Substack page: https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/
At the same time as he was writing that poem, Merrill began writing his lengthy poetic trilogy in which he reflected on large questions about the future of human life on the planet. He did so, oddly enough, through the use of a Ouija board that he used to communicate with the spirits of the dead, especially recently dead poets and friends such as Auden and a character from the ancient Hellenist world called Ephraim. (Merrill seems to have had the kind of negative capability that allowed him both to believe and not to believe that he was actually communicating with a higher spiritual order that was using him and his poetry to communicate necessary truths to mankind.) The first poem in the trilogy is frequently autobiographical and contains superb, moving poetry. The other two poems are more controversial. They are extremely long, with stronger messages from the other world about dangers to the human race and with Merrill seeming to take far too seriously every single New Age fad of the 1970s, from Stonehenge to the pyramids, as if these were partial vehicles for the relations of the spirit world to the earth. At the same time he tries unconvincingly to give a kind of scientific credibility to this work through a metaphorical exploitation of many findings in physics, such as the theory of black holes. Merrill seems to believe that an elite group of poets and artists must work now to raise the spiritual level of the planet in order to save it. That elitism occasionally allows for disturbing hints of racism in his decisions about who might belong to this elite.
Putting those two long poems aside (Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant) Merrill’s reputation as a great American poet is made fully secure by perhaps a hundred brilliant poems that combine unsurpassed formal technique with deeply moving meditations on how an individual life ultimately comes to have the shape that it does. After Merrill, who died from complications of AIDS in 1995, the inclusion in poetry of highly detailed reporting on the emotional vicissitudes of an individual gay life can be taken for granted as hardly remarkable. Hammer’s is one of the great biographies of recent decades.
For further writing on topics and books like this one, see my Substack page: https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/
April 20, 2018
This was great because Hammer's favorite Merrill poems are also mine, and so he went into depth just where I hoped he would. I still say someone could write a great biography of the last two years alone--"Christmas Tree" as epilogue.
January 12, 2026
A gigantic biography, sad when James Merrill’s life was sad, wry when it was wry, claustrophobic when claustrophobic, but always dazzling with a need to build some kind of house ‘out of the life lived’ and the ‘love spent.’
May 23, 2015
James Ingram Merrill (poet, gay) had a 40 yr. relationship with David Noyes Jackson (Peter Hooten) (gay companion).
Charles Edward Merrill (dad) & Hellen Ingram Merrill (mom) were his biological parents.
Charles & Hellen got a divorce.
Charles married Elizabeth Eliza Joyce Church & they had 2 children: Charles E. Merrill Jr. & Doris Merrill.
Charles & Edmund Calvert Lynch founded Merrill Lynch that still prospers & exists globally today.
Dad never approved of his being gay. I’m guessing he is a momma’s boy & for the most part had a very good relationship with her.
James & David traveled the globe & lived a very lavish lifestyle.
James knew & associated with everybody that was somebody in several different professions & walks of life.
A remarkable poet & a very kind & generous philanthropist.
The bad news is his promiscuous behavior led him to a horrible death due to medical conditions. It was more than likely AIDS/HIV.
I have a fascination with the eccentric wealthy PPL which covers those like: Howard Hughes, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (DuPont heirs), Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andre Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, & now James Merrill.
I did not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers & authors, I am under no obligation to write a positive review. Only an honest one.
A very awesome book cover, great font & writing style. A very well written biography book. It was very easy for me to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no grammar/typo errors, nor any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great set of unique characters to keep track of. This could also make another great biography movie, PP presentation or mini TV series (A & E). It took me forever to read & comprehend. There is no doubt in my mind this is a very easy rating of 5 stars.
Thank you for the free Goodreads; UCP paperback book
Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)
Charles Edward Merrill (dad) & Hellen Ingram Merrill (mom) were his biological parents.
Charles & Hellen got a divorce.
Charles married Elizabeth Eliza Joyce Church & they had 2 children: Charles E. Merrill Jr. & Doris Merrill.
Charles & Edmund Calvert Lynch founded Merrill Lynch that still prospers & exists globally today.
Dad never approved of his being gay. I’m guessing he is a momma’s boy & for the most part had a very good relationship with her.
James & David traveled the globe & lived a very lavish lifestyle.
James knew & associated with everybody that was somebody in several different professions & walks of life.
A remarkable poet & a very kind & generous philanthropist.
The bad news is his promiscuous behavior led him to a horrible death due to medical conditions. It was more than likely AIDS/HIV.
I have a fascination with the eccentric wealthy PPL which covers those like: Howard Hughes, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (DuPont heirs), Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andre Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, & now James Merrill.
I did not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers & authors, I am under no obligation to write a positive review. Only an honest one.
A very awesome book cover, great font & writing style. A very well written biography book. It was very easy for me to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no grammar/typo errors, nor any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great set of unique characters to keep track of. This could also make another great biography movie, PP presentation or mini TV series (A & E). It took me forever to read & comprehend. There is no doubt in my mind this is a very easy rating of 5 stars.
Thank you for the free Goodreads; UCP paperback book
Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)
July 13, 2015
Langdon Hammer's incredibly detailed biography of the poet James Merrill is most welcome to those of us who have long been fans of Merrill's work, but who lacked a guide to the autobiographical details that his work is based on. While I concur with other critics that the book would have benefitted from a strong editor who might have shortened its daunting length (800 pages, not counting the notes and index ), I also don't know what I would have wanted left out, now that I've fought my way through to the end. Certainly, not the discussion of Merrill's work that is folded into the biography. After all, Merrill was a relentless worker, drafting and revising poems from the time he was a small boy right up to his notebook in his hospital room before he died. He used his life as the material of his work, but Hammer clarifies to what extent Merrill also felt free to "fictionalize" things, changing names or locations, to better suit his work. A contemporary of "autobiographical" poets like Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, he preferred subjecting his experiences to the rigors of form, and was willing to alter the "facts" of his life if it made for a better poem. Anyone who has read Merrill feels that we have come to know his many friends, especially those who inhabit his long poem "The Changing Light at Sandover." Hammer fleshes out the "spirits" who exist in Merrill's poem, and provides a much better picture of the life Merrill really led. For anyone unfamiliar with Merrill, you you could worse than to begin with this biography before moving on to Merrill's beautiful, award-winning poems.
February 2, 2015
"Look at each other closely, as friends will
On parting. This is not farewell,
Not now. Yet something in the sad
End-of-season light remains unsaid."
"The Changing Light at Sandover" 1982
I was given this amazing biography by the Goodreads first reads program. It is written by Langdon Hammer a Professor of Poetry at Yale.
James Merrill was born to Charles Merrill, (of Merrill Lynch fame) and Helen Ingram Merrill. It was a second marriage so he also had a stepsister and stepbrother. When young he wanted to be like Oscar Wilde.
He was a strange and talented person who died from AIDS right before all of the great drugs came out that have allowed people to live so much longer.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry "Divine Comedies". He also wrote poetry through a Ouija board which I admit seems quite strange.
He had many loves in his life and he really was a complicated man. The author has included tons of notes on his research and I believe this will become a scholarly classic on James Merrill's life.
I had never known anything about James Merrill before I read this book, but this book has made me want to read his poems.
James Merrill lived a remarkable life and wrote beautiful and sometimes haunting poems.
On parting. This is not farewell,
Not now. Yet something in the sad
End-of-season light remains unsaid."
"The Changing Light at Sandover" 1982
I was given this amazing biography by the Goodreads first reads program. It is written by Langdon Hammer a Professor of Poetry at Yale.
James Merrill was born to Charles Merrill, (of Merrill Lynch fame) and Helen Ingram Merrill. It was a second marriage so he also had a stepsister and stepbrother. When young he wanted to be like Oscar Wilde.
He was a strange and talented person who died from AIDS right before all of the great drugs came out that have allowed people to live so much longer.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry "Divine Comedies". He also wrote poetry through a Ouija board which I admit seems quite strange.
He had many loves in his life and he really was a complicated man. The author has included tons of notes on his research and I believe this will become a scholarly classic on James Merrill's life.
I had never known anything about James Merrill before I read this book, but this book has made me want to read his poems.
James Merrill lived a remarkable life and wrote beautiful and sometimes haunting poems.
July 29, 2015
This book is not for the faint of heart or the casual fan of poetry. It's massive, plain and simple. Exclusive of the notes, it's just under 800 pages of some of the most detailed observations I think I've ever read in a biography. It helps that all of Merrill's papers and correspondence were bequeathed to WUSTL and that the author painstakingly sought out those who knew Merill.
At times, it does drag. How many times can one person visit Greece? (Answer: Many, many times. Several times a year. For decades.) Overall, this was the most comprehensive portrait of a person I've ever read.
At times, it does drag. How many times can one person visit Greece? (Answer: Many, many times. Several times a year. For decades.) Overall, this was the most comprehensive portrait of a person I've ever read.
July 26, 2015
I wanted to like it, but no.
I wanted to like him, but no to that too. Not Merrill's fault, but his biographer's.
This is a recitation of faces (family, lovers, students) and places (the mansions of childhood, followed by Amherst College, Athens, Stonington, Madison, WI, California ...) and all the while a growing body of poems. Sterile, bloodless. Not Merrill, and maybe not all his poems, either. Just this book. It's a record, no doubt helpful but I like some life when reading a life.
I wanted to like him, but no to that too. Not Merrill's fault, but his biographer's.
This is a recitation of faces (family, lovers, students) and places (the mansions of childhood, followed by Amherst College, Athens, Stonington, Madison, WI, California ...) and all the while a growing body of poems. Sterile, bloodless. Not Merrill, and maybe not all his poems, either. Just this book. It's a record, no doubt helpful but I like some life when reading a life.
August 8, 2016
Very well written and got me to care about a subject I had no background in, even if I found the literary analysis a bit dull. Not sure what could have been cut, but it's a monster of a book. I really liked how Hammer got the reader to connect with the people in the text, but also made them uncomfortable with their failings.
June 17, 2015
Exhaustive but nicely-paced biography of the poet. Amazing ability to keep the many people differentiated. (I did wonder, though why Cecelia Holland is referred to as being known as a "writer of fiction for young people" when most of her work is for adults).
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July 8, 2016find the biography hard going because the author keeps swopping between initials, nicknames and full names and as 'Uncle Tom Cobbley and all' float through the book, you can't keep up with characters easily, it's very tiring trying to sort them out every page!
September 6, 2015
For any fan of James Merrill, this is a must-have. It is fascinating to read the lives and afterlives that inspired him. And it's pretty dishy too.
July 27, 2015
Fine literary biography. The sections about JM and DJ's ouija sessions were thoughtfully, insightfully done.
December 29, 2024
At times detailed and focused, at other, fills in with trivial excursions. I’d like more poetry and some photos.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews