Merrill, James [Ingram]
Merrill, James [Ingram]( 1926–95),born in New York, after graduation from Amherst (1947) began his literary career with First Poems (1951), followed by further and increasingly philosophic poetry marked by an elegant and disciplined style in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966, National Book Award), The Fire Screen (1969), Braving the Elements (1972), The Yellow Pages (1974), and Divine Comedies (1976, Pulitzer Prize), including the long narrative “Book of Ephraim.” That work, partly a Platonic symposium incorporating fictive and real characters (principally Auden), was continued and elaborated in his next two volumes of verse, Mirabell (1978) and Scripts for the Pageant (1980). From the First Nine Poems (1982) and The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) collect his poems. Merrill won a Bollingen Prize...
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