Merrill, James (Vol. 18) - Denis Donoghue
DENIS DONOGHUE
[If one uses] the usual domestic routines, illnesses, visits, weather, a problem with wallpaper, a failure of the telephone, you have enough, given Mr. Merrill's inventiveness, to make a poem of 80 or 90 pages….
His common style is a net of loose talk tightening to verse, a mode in which nearly anything can be said with grace….
"The Book of Ephraim" gave inspiration a new life by providing lines not only ghost-ridden but, at least in some measure, ghost-written.
With "Mirabell," something went wrong…. [The] real misfortune is that JM is instructed to write a poetry of Science…. Unfortunately, 741 does not warn JM of the risks attendant upon trying to out-Auden Auden…. [You] can't rival Auden by turning popular science into verse. (p. 11)
I am afraid "Scripts for the Pageant" persists in the portentousness and vanity of "Mirabell." Its subject is nothing less than the meaning of life, but the poem degrades the...
[The entire page is 334 words long]
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