James Merrill
The Evolution of the Flightless Bird "How blessed were we, the Village of Stonington and all of us, to have been able to know and love James Ingram Merrill. To have the icon of American literature living here, acting just like one of us, an ordinary citizen, for forty-plus years, while touching our lives with light" (Boatwright 1). The strong statement, made by Mrs. Boatwright at the dedication of the James Merrill Reading Room, "...the icon of American literature..." reflects just what James Merrill was, an inspiration, a pioneer, and an icon of American literature that was looked upon by such poets as Robert Frost. James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926. He grew up in Manhattan and Southampton. He was the son of Charles E. Merrill, a co-founder of the brokerage firm now known as Merrill Lynch, an investment-banking firm (Britannica 1), and his second wife, Hellen Ingram Merrill, who published a small newspaper (Keene 1). James' home life was filled with wealth and privilege. As he was growing up he attended mostly private schools, and did a lot of personal study. He was taught both French and German. A passion from childhood onward was music, especially opera, to which he was introduced at the
Was I ever coming back? Yes, yes, one of these days. By the time of his graduation from high school his verse had already appeared in poetry and the Kenyon Review, and he published his first book of poems, The Black Swan. It was an early poem on a subject familiar to readers of English poetry. Charles Berger has described the epic as "what may well be the most astonishing poem ever written by an American. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977. "In my second semester at Amherst one of my teachers arranged a tete-a-tete with Robert Frost, suggesting that I bring along two or three short poems. John Hollander writes that Merrill's work "was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginativ!e memory even more mysterious. " Copyright a 2000 Modern American Poetry. The fifties brought 3 great titles First Poems, Short Stories and The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems. Yannina was printed in New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1973. After a year of study he was drafted to the U.
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Acceptance Essays
