Dec 16, 2009
No American poet since Marianne Moore has been so concerned with armoring as James Merrill. His early work is almost entirely a carefully crafted set of subterfuges to hide the true emotional self. As Judith Moffett has noted in her book James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry (1984), Merrill’s subject matter is most often passion or emotional involvement, and at first he used Auden’s device of addressing a nongendered “you” to conceal his homosexual loves. After 1973, when he decided to become more open about his emotional life, he dropped some of his protective...
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