Collected Poems.Collected Poems Among the numerous literary works titled Collected Poems are the following:
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize Any of a series of annual prizes awarded by Columbia University for outstanding public service and achievement in American journalism, letters, and music. Fellowships are also awarded. , the National Book Critics Circle Award, and two National Book Awards (to name just a few honors), James Merrill was a poet's poet. Supernaturally skilled in the techniques of verse, he churned out dense, meticulously metered, often brilliantly rhymed stanzas on everything from insects to angels. But unlike fellow gay bards Allen Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara, he was never really a people's poet, the kind familiar to the masses and quoted at cafes. Collected Poems, a wonderfully exhaustive and exhausting volume edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser and spanning Merril's 50-year career, could change that. The wealthy son of a financier (of Merrill Lynch fame), James Merrill was a privileged and precocious talent. Maddeningly allusive al·lu·sive adj. Containing or characterized by indirect references: an allusive speech. al·lu and frequently small in scope, his earliest works, from First Poems (1951) and The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), are highly wrought and rarefied rar·e·fied also rar·i·fied adj. 1. Belonging to or reserved for a small select group; esoteric. 2. Elevated in character or style; lofty. rarefied Adjective 1. gems catering to those with the training and inclination to decipher them. As he and his craft matured, however, his writing became increasingly personal and more openly gay. Many of those poems--originally published in Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966), The Fire Screen (1969), and Braving the Elements (1972)--involve Merrill's existential and erotic ruminations on his male lovers, including his life partner, David Jackson. Although Merrill's early and middle periods provide their share of fairly accessible delights, such as "A Renewal," "The Mad Scene," and "Days of 1964," all concerning the vicissitudes vicissitudes Noun, pl changes in circumstance or fortune [Latin vicis change] vicissitudes npl → vicisitudes fpl; peripecias fpl of romantic affection, it is the later poems--from Late Settings (1985), The Inner Room (1988), and A Scattering of Salts (1995)--that are among his best, most inviting and deeply resonant works. Taking on self-help, consumerism, Clinton, and AIDS (he died of the disease's complications in 1995), his final poems prove that Merrill was not merely a master of measured verse but a profound chronicler of the human condition. Bahr writes for The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times and Time Out New York. |
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