James Merrill: Sublime Poet of the Everyday

James Merrill (Photo by Rollie McKenna)

Edward Mendelson, in his “The Genius and Generosity of Jimmy Merrill” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016), says of Merrill, “Poetic artifice was his natural voice.” I’m not sure he’s right. He makes Merrill sound as if he’s anti-realist. What I cherish in Merrill’s poems is his deep engagement with quotidian reality. For example, the description of the New Age shop where he bought his world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker, in “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1992):

I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile 


Emporia catering to the collective unconscious 


Of our time and place. This one featured crystals, 


Cassettes of whalesong and rain-forest whistles, 


Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins, 


Recycled notebooks, mechanized lucite coffins 

For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede, 

As they presumably do in nature still.

Dan Chiasson, in his brilliant “Out of this World” (The New Yorker, April 13, 2015), a review of Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, says of Merrill:

His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an “Atari dragonfly” on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.

This, for me, is a more accurate description of Merrill’s work than Mendelson’s “poetic artifice.”