r three short poems. Sure enough we were presently left alone, I and the famous old man bent over my stanzas" (Merrill 15). After a year of study he was drafted to the U.S. Army, and served in World War II, until it ended in 1945. When he returned home, he went back to college, and eventually majoring in literature. Having written a thesis on Marcel Proust, who became a major inspiration for his work, he graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1947 (Keene 1). 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..."
             After college, he decided to go back to New York to write. Since his the Merrill family fortune was so large, he did not have to earn a living, while in his time of writing. He went on to teach for a year at Bard College, but he found the atmosphere too intense and distracting for serious work. He traveled for the next two years in Europe and Asia, reflecting on his life and family and apparently coming to terms with his homosexuality (Keene 1).
             "Meaning to stay as long as possible, I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt that I alone in this or that circle of friends could see no way into the next phase...Was I ever coming back? Yes, yes, one of these days. But of course I would be a different person then" (Merrill 3)
             In 1955 he moved to the small coastal town of Stonington, Connecticut, with his life long companion David Jackson. Two years later, he and David bought a house in Athens, and Key West, Florida where they dividedly dwelled each year until 1979.
             By the time of his graduation from high school his verse had already appeared in poetry and the Kenyon Review, and he published his...