[Richard Wakefield]

The current New Yorker has a long and very laudatory piece by Helen Vendler on Merrill's new collected poems. Since we had quite a discussion on Merrill over at Musing on Mastery, I'd love to see someone post a commentary on it -- either on the review or on the book itself. And if no one else will do it, I just may have to do it myself.
Richard

[Michael Juster]

Vendler is not exactly one of my favorite critics. She is highly self-indulgent in the way that Bloom has licensed for the profession, but she does manage periods of intermittent lucidity between runs of claptrap.
Her Merrill piece is an odd one in that it seems founded on the notion that Merrill was a great poet, but she never goes out of her way to make the case terribly strongly, and damns him fairly harshly from time to time. For instance, you can sense her sanitizing her own feelings just a bit when she says, "For many readers--and even many critics--writing this way is merely tatting around the edges of art." I also question her thesis that Merrill was essentially a comic poet (...yet he is a comic writer, not a tragic one..."); she sets it up as if there were only two choices, and the truth that Merrill was not a tragic poet does not lead to the conclusion that he was a comic one either.
If you parse the discussion that analyzes actual lines as opposed to her general blather, it seems to me that much of what she is saying is consistent with my previous assault on Merrill. In my opinion, he is as creative with technique as any formalist since Auden (sorry Alicia, it's true, but you're right up there). However, he is barren emotionally, disconnected from everyday life, and stuck with a wry, derivative view of the world that is occasionally interesting but very wearing overall. Some of the reasons for that worldview are sad, but a sad story doesn't reclaim the poetry. The much acclaimed Sandover is drivel dressed up with bric a brac, and not as technically impressive as his shorter lyrics.
Read Vendler carefully, and you know she has some doubts along this score even though she tries to mask them.

[Richard Wakefield]

Michael, thanks for a much more discerning look at Vendler's review than I gave it. I was puzzled by her calling Merrill a comic poet, and I looked in vain for an explanation of what she could mean; you must be right that she's simply indulging the "either... or" fallacy. However, I was pleased that she looked at a couple of poems, or bits of poems, in considerable detail. That's something critics rarely do, either for lack of space or lack of the ability to focus that closely. In APR, for example, the reviews and criticisms seem to be their own little prose poems that riff on the verse ostensibly under discussion. But let's not get started on APR.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

From Mike: "However, he is barren emotionally, disconnected from everyday life, and stuck with a wry, derivative view of the world that is occasionally interesting but very wearing overall. Some of the reasons for that worldview are sad, but a sad story doesn't reclaim the poetry."

I met him at a reading, and the only thing that really endeared him to me was that he was as slim and freckled as I was. Sad story? I have fought for every dollar I've made, and I really can't imagine being Charles Merrill's son, the beneficiary of a trust over which I had no voice but from which I would receive an income no man could ever spend. Nonetheless a dinner at Key West was cancelled because it was scheduled for the day Merrill died. The Wilburs were shattered, just devastated. And I know from others that he was much loved, that he is much missed.

I surely don't see any reason in his work to consider him a major poet, but he must have been a wonderfully winsome man.

[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited March 13, 2001).]

[Len Krisak]

Heresy of heresies, here it comes:

Merrill can be brilliant (I mean his poems--I never
met the man). Especially in metaphor, for which I
love him. Worrying about how much money he had
won't get any of us anywhere.

Vendler is nuttier than a fruitcake on Shakespeare's
sonnets (I mean her book), but she gave this year's
Frost lecture at Lawrence and it was TERRIFIC. True,
she tends to stay with analysis of imagery, etc., but
there's nothing wrong with that. Her super-close
reading of some of Frost's poems had both Rhina
and me nodding in agreement.

Cheers

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Len Krisak:
Vendler is nuttier than a fruitcake on Shakespeare's
sonnets (I mean her book)

Helen Vendler is a fraud. All her books are ridiculous. Her book on George Herbert buries him. She has not the faintest idea of what Herbert was talking about. She misses the point on the simplest stuff. You are all being taken in by a con artist--or maybe she is just an honest nut case. One thing is certain--she is an intellectual disgrace--but in the last fifty years when has that been a bar to rising high in the academic community? That any of you can take her seriously shows that you have tofu for brains.

[Len Krisak]

Have you read her Frost lecture?

[robert mezey]

There's no reason to be so intemperate, Ewrgall.
But I must say I agree, more or less. She may not
be a fraud, but for someone who wields so much
power in the poetry world, she's very mediocre.
She was ridiculous on Herbert and Keats; I haven't
seen her book on Shakespeare's sonnets but I dread
to think what she'd do with them. And her bad
taste is almost infallible.
But Merrill now---there's a kind of cool detachment
in most of his work that a lot of readers might not
warm to it. But the man could write. And the passions
and feelings are there, albeit well beneath the surface.
Read his wonderful long ballad "The Summer People" or
"Days of 1935" or "The Broken Home". Here's a tiny
one, "The Romance Language"--

When first in love I breakfasted by water.
The chestnut trees were in full bloom, I fear.
A voice at my elbow breathed, "Monsieur desire?"
I understood perhaps, but could not utter.

Some stay years, and still are easy to lie to.
Frog and prince have been witty at my expense.
My answers when they come make less than sense
Although I tell the god's own truth, or try to.

As for his personal life, I don't know, I never met
him. But friends who knew him loved him; many loved
him. As for his enormous wealth, it wasn't his fault
he was born rich any more than it was his fault he was
born white or gay. And he was very generous. (I had
a couple of Ingram Merrill fellowships myself---that
was his money, and many of them were handed out, year
after year.)