The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill

James Merrill is now widely recognized as one of the essential poets of our time, one of those whose achievement will define postwar American literature. The Consuming Myth is a discerning account of his work that will well serve amateur and initiate alike. Stephen Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. His close readings shed light on Merrill's boldly and subtly original techniques, his kinship with Mallarmé, Proust, Yeats, Stevens, and others, and the network of connections among his diverse undertakings. Yenser suggests that Merrill's special power springs in part from transactions between evidently opposing perceptions. On the one hand-as the result of some poetic version of what physicists call "pair production"-whatever Merrill looks at hard yields its contraries. All about him, and within him too, he discovers duality and division. On the other hand, he is profoundly aware of the interconnectedness of things, whether they be his life and his art (which we might think of as aspects of his work), or humanity and nature, or good and evil. It is out of quarrels with ourselves that we make poetry, Yeats observed; and it is in striving to accommodate intuitions of both difference and identity that Merrill has fashioned his distinctive manner.

Table of Contents:
* Backward-Looking Figures: A Recent Poem through Some Early Work * Breaking And Entering: The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, Water Street, and The (Diblos) Notebook * Double Burdens: Nights and Days * At the Web's Heart: The Fire Screen and Braving the Elements * The Fullness of Time: The Book of Ephraim * The Nature of Mind: Mirabell's Books of Mumber * The Names of God: Scripts for the Pageant and "Coda: The Higher Keys" * A Shutter Opens: Late Settings and The Image Maker * Works By James Merrill * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index

About the Author :
Stephen Yenser is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and Clos Camardon, a chapbook of poems.

Review :
As an introduction to Merrill, this book is excellent. But even the most knowledgeable of the poet’s readers is likely to be engaged by Yenser’s fine explications. This is an unusually artful book of sympathetic interpretation.