Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Ingram Merrill and published by Alfred a Knopf Incorporated. This book was released on 1993 with total page 560 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. 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, an 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. --Alfred A. Knopf.
Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 A Whole World written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.
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 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 Familiar Spirits written by Alison Lurie and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 2001 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the results of this intense preoccupation with the occult were a book-length poem, which some critics have called a masterpiece, and the possible destruction of several lives.".
Download or read book The Consuming Myth written by Stephen Yenser and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.
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 The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 2006 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling epic poem remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years starting in 1976.
Download or read book Collected Poems written by James Merrill and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential addition to every shelf of 20-century poetry.
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 The Columbia History of American Poetry written by Jay Parini and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1993-12-23 with total page 936 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- New York Times Book Review
Download or read book From the First Nine written by James Merrill and published by New York : Atheneum. This book was released on 1982 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bloemlezing uit negen bundels.
Download or read book James Merrill and W H Auden written by P. Gwiazda and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.
Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 1992 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
