Collected Poems James Merrill - Softcover

Merrill, James; McClatchy, J. D.; Yenser, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037570941X ISBN 13: 9780375709418

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2002

Synopsis

Fifty years of the author's acclaimed poetry--with works ranging from his earliest anthology, The Black Swan and Other Poems, to the posthumous volume A Scattering of Salts--are collected into a single volume for the first time, celebrating a lifetime of verse by one of the twentieth century's literary masters. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

James Merrill was born on March 3, 1926, in New York City and died on February 6, 1995. From the mid-1950's on, he lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and for extended periods he also had houses in Athens and Key West. From The Black Swan (1946) through A Scattering of Salts (1995), he wrote twelve books of poems, ten of them published in trade editions, as well as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). He also published two plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1860); two novels, The Seraglio (1957, reissued in 1987) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965, reissued in 1994); a book of essays, interviews, and reviews, Recitative (1986); and a memoir, A Different Person (1993). Over the years, he was the winner of numerous awards for his poetry, including two National Book Awards, the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the first Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

ion of James Merrill's Collected Poems is a landmark in the history of modern American literature. His First Poems its sophistication and virtuosity were recognized at once appeared half a century ago. Over the next five decades, Merrill's range broadened and his voice took on its characteristic richness. In book after book, his urbanity and wit, his intriguing images and paradoxes, shone with a rare brilliance. As he once told an interviewer, he "looked for English in its billiard-table sense words that have been set spinning against their own gravity." But beneath their surface glamour, his poems were driven by an audacious imagination that continually sought to deepen and refine our perspectives on experience. Among other roles, he was one of the supreme love poets of the twentieth century. In delicate lyric or complex narrative, this book abounds with what he once called his "chronicles of love and loss." Like Wallace Stevens and W. H

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037570941X
• ISBN 13: 9780375709418
• Binding: Paperback