Download or read book Structure and Imagery in The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill written by Mary Louise Clifton and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world. The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.
Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1982 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board
Download or read book James Merrill Postmodern Magus written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.
Download or read book A Reader s Guide to James Merrill s The Changing Light at Sandover written by Robert Polito and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time
Download or read book James Merrill Essays in Criticism written by David Lehman and published by Ithaca : Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merrill's trilogy, published in three separate volumes and reprinted in its entirety in The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum, 1982), provides the focal point and inspiration for these 11 essays. The authors cover Merrill's linguistic inventiveness and his love of puns and palindromes. Includes David Kalstone's essay on autobiographical details in Merrill's work, Rachel Jacoff's explanation of his debt to Dante and David Jackson's eyewitness account of Merrill transcribing messages at his Ouija board. ISBN 0-8014-1404-0 : $22.50.
Download or read book The Book of Ephraim written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.
Download or read book James Merrill s Apocalypse written by Timothy Materer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Materer interprets Merrill's body of work from the perspective of his epic The Changing Light at Sandover and shows that in his earliest poems and in the volumes preceding The Changing Light, Merrill repeatedly expressed his fear of nuclear holocaust and his sense that some momentous revelation was near at hand. Materer demonstrates how apocalyptic motifs also inspire Late Settings, The Inner Room, and A Scattering of Salts."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Reading the I Ching Book of Changes written by Geoffrey Redmond and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 3,000 year old I Ching is the most esteemed of the ancient Chinese classics, yet also the most enigmatic. Reading the I Ching (Book of Changes) incorporates recent advances in scholarship, such as recently excavated texts, and demonstrates how the Zhouyi (the ancient textual layer of the I Ching) was compiled from mostly oral material and how it was organized to serve as an easily consulted compendium of divination responses. In this book Geoffrey Redmond clarifies the meanings of the ancient text by examining use of literary devices such as prognostic terms, imagery from daily life, rhetorical tropes, metaphors, proverbs and set phrases. This provides insight on how the Zhouyi was composed and explains its use for divination. It also shows how, centuries later, the Zhouyi was adapted by the Confucians, who believed it to be the creation of ancient sages, and the source of their metaphysics and cosmology. Redmond also analyzes the Changes through a variety of philological heuristics, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, methods of analogy and anomaly, the distinction between argumentative and context dependence, as well as modern approaches such as Jungian psychology, and critical theory. Included are the interlinear Chinese text, and a glossary of key words in English, Chinese, and pinyin, making it essential reading for students studying Chinese philosophy, Chinese religion, and early Chinese history, as well as readers looking for a clear and accessible gloss of this text.
Download or read book The Poetry of Disturbance written by David Bergman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, David Bergman argues that post-war poetry underwent a significant shift from a visual to oral emphasis.
Download or read book Familiar Spirits written by Alison Lurie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-02-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.
Download or read book A Scattering of Salts written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 1995 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of poetry in which the author transforms autobiographical insights and experiences into profound meditations on life and the world around him.
Download or read book Grimms Tales for Young and Old written by Brothers Grimm and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of all ages, two hundred and ten tales of the Brothers Grimm, including "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Snow White," and "Hansel and Gretel," translated by Ralph Manheim, the highly acclaimed and prize-winning translator. Manheim has rediscovered in the original German Grimms’ editions of the tales the unadorned, direct rhythm of the oral form in which they were first recorded. He has retained their ageless magic and mythology and restored the extraordinary vitality and wit, the acute perceptions of human strength and facility mirrored in the facets of these small gems. “The best modern translation of the complete Brothers Grimm.”--Choice
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book James Merrill written by Langdon Hammer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--
Download or read book Last Looks Last Books written by Helen Vendler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.
Download or read book Masters Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
