Volume 23, Number 4 · March 18, 1976
News from the Muse
By Helen Vendler
Divine Comedies
by James Merrill
Atheneum, 137 pp., $8.95
Since he published his First Poems twenty-five years ago, James Merrill's energies have been divided between successive books of increasingly brilliant lyric poems (the most recent, Braving the Elements, in 1972) and attempts in larger fictional forms—two plays (1955 and 1960) and two novels (1957 and 1965). The flashes and glimpses of 'plot' in some of the lyrics—especially the longer poems—reminded Merrill's readers that he wanted more than the usual proportion of dailiness and detail in his lyrics, while preserving a language far from the plainness of journalistic poetry, a language full of arabesques, fancifulness, play of wit, and oblique metaphor. And yet the novels were not the solution, as Merrill himself apparently sensed.
Review, 3408 words
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