Thread: James Merrill
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Unread 11-15-2017, 04:05 PM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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Aaron, perhaps I should have given you the whole essay. I think she makes a very good case for Merrill as a writer of surprising depths and range of both thought and feeling. Her analysis of "Charles on Fire" is wonderful, bringing out all the eery transformational magic of that poem.

Perhaps "transformation" is one of the keys to Merrill's work, the way he feels life as a perpetual search for transformation. The Mozart comparison is pushing it but not, I think, totally unwarranted. Perhaps one major quality is missing and that is the "popular" touch, which Mozart also possessed (like Verdi, like Shakespeare...). Merrill is always going to be a rather specialist taste - but the same is true, for example, of Henry James or Proust, to mention two writers he admired. But definitely not minor. And definitely not bloodless.
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