Merrill, James - Timothy Materer (essay date 1990)

Timothy Materer (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “The Error of His Ways: James Merrill and the Fall into Myth,” in American Poetry, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 64-86.

[In the following essay, Materer probes the mythic unconscious of Merrill's poetry.]

You will recall that in the case of the [slip of the tongue] the man was asked how he had arrived at the wrong word ‘Vorschwein’ and the first thing that occurred to him gave us the explanation. Our technique with dreams, then, is a very simple one, copied from this example … the dreamer knows about his dream; the only question is how to make it possible for him to discover his knowledge and communicate it to us.

—Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

The prosaic first lines of The Changing Light at Sandover, “Admittedly, I err by undertaking / This in its present form” (3), are a key to its poetic technique. The...

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