James Merrill's Mirror: On Ghosts, Allusion, and the Reflections of Tradition

To American readers of poetry, it may not be necessary to provide an introduction to James Merrill. A poet described in his lifetime (1926–1995) as "indispensable" and "dazzling," compared to Yeats and Proust, and hailed by Harold Bloom as "an absolute master of diction, metrics and cognitive music," Merrill's reputation has held steady in the years since his passing. A healthy industry in scholarship continues to find new things to say about this fascinating poet, who—to quote Bloom again—had "profound affinities with the great artists in verse: Milton, Pope, Tennyson and Auden." Of the generation of American formalists born in the 1920s, it is Merrill's oeuvre which may be most insured against the ravages of posterity.

Yet in the United Kingdom, James Merrill remains a shamefully neglected figure. My copy of his Collected Poems, a treasured book in a house of books, is the American edition published by Knopf in 2001. There is no British edition of the Collected Poems, nor is there even a British edition of the Selected Poems published in 2008. A limited selection was published by Carcanet in 1996, the year after his death, but otherwise the UK has shown little interest in James Merrill in the decades since. For a poet so immersed in the canon of English verse, Merrill makes for a ghostly presence indeed in that tradition's mother country.

As it happens, ghostly presences can be found everywhere in Merrill's poetry. Take "The Will," which appears in the Pulitzer Prizewinning collection Divine Comedies (1976). It relates the loss of a stone bird, "SACRED TO THOTH," the Egyptian God of magic, writing, and the judgement of the dead. Lost along with the antique is a bag containing the manuscript of a failed novel, which will in turn become the basis for the long poem—Merrill's masterpiece—which closes the collection and which has been published separately in an annotated edition (Knopf, 2018) as The Book of Ephraim.

It is "The Will" that features the first published appearance of Ephraim (meaning "double fruitfulness" in Hebrew), the familiar spirit animating the longer poem. Ephraim is a deceased person, a "Greek Jew" from the early days of the Roman Empire, who speaks at one of the many sessions with a Ouija board held by Merrill and his partner David Jackson, urging the poet to "SET MY TEACHINGS DOWN":

IF YOU DO NOT YR WORLD WILL BE UNDONE & HEAVEN ITSELF TURN TO ONE GRINNING SKULL

It is a strange moment, where the world of the living ("YR WORLD") and the world of the dead ("HEAVEN") threaten to bleakly reflect each other as "ONE GRINNING SKULL." When Merrill inquires what he must do to prevent this from happening, Ephraim bids him "PLEASANT DREAMS" and takes his leave with this mysterious advice:

GIVE UP EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE GHOST

In order to better understand James Merrill, and his place in poetic tradition, this essay shall attempt to follow that ghost.

________

If we are to go ghost hunting, then we might begin by understanding how ghosts function in poetry. Christopher Ricks suggests that ghosts are a figure for self-reflection and literary allusion, that mode in which poets converse with each other across the generations. This is considered at length in an essay on a contemporary of Merrill's, Anthony Hecht, in the book True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (Yale University Press, 2010). Similarly, Ricks finds that if "Eliot is at times a shade and even a shadow [in Hecht's poetry], the shades of the dead are for Hecht—as for many poets—the conceivers of new life." He goes on to say that "ghosts haunt Hecht's poems" and attempts to describe them:

Some of them appear to be ghosts pure and simple. (Yet what would that be, exactly?) But most of them are ghosts who breathe the air of allusion, who are there in allusion's immediate vicinity with an apprehension of how allusion may itself function as...