James Merrill

While at Amherst, Merrill wrote his thesis on Marcel Proust, and in many ways the great French writer’s themes of memory, nostalgia, and loss became Merrill’s own. The fusion of autobiography and archetype was a hallmark of Merrill's verse. David Kalstone explained in the Times Literary Supplement that Merrill’s relatively privileged existence allowed him to focus intensely on the poetic act itself: “He [Merrill] has not led the kind of outwardly dramatic life which would make external changes the centre of his poetry. Instead, poetry itself has been one of the changes, something which continually happens to him, and Merrill’s subject proves to be the subject of the great Romantics: the constant revisions of the self that come through writing verse. Each book seems more spacious because of the one which has come before.” Though centered on the self, Merrill’s poetry is far from self-centered. Helen Vendler observed in the New York Times Book Review that the best of Merrill's poems “are autobiographical without being 'confessional': they show none of that urgency to reveal the untellable or unspeakable that we associate with the poetry we call 'confessional'.”

A master of forms, Merrill’s later poetry rarely feels formal. In the Atlantic Monthly, poet X.J. Kennedy observed that “Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, 'all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.'“