James Merrill’s Secret Scansions

As the Ouija board provided James Merrill with his esoteric themes, iambic pentameter was his medium for “evoking fresh speech.” He attributed his unfamiliar rhythms to “secret scanning” in a meter that had been stable for centuries. His frequent use of less common modulations like headless lines, epic cesuras, and compression often makes the verse—both lyric and epic—sound loose or unmetrical but also rich and strange, even when the themes are more down-to-earth. The essay reviews the fine details of iambic scansion Merrill used to create unprecedented rhythms.