[In the following review, Kirsch compares James Merrill's Collected Poems to Lurie's Familiar Spirits.]

Proust's Madeleine has become the popular shorthand for his novel, the Atlantis of memory resurfacing after a single taste of a cookie dipped in tea. In fact, Proust's metaphor for remembering is much more arduous:

I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed. … Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss.

It is instructive to compare James Merrill's rival metaphor for the process that turns life into art, in his poem “For Proust”:

What happened is becoming literature.
Feverish in time, if you suspend the task,
An old. old woman shuffling in to draw
Curtains, will read a line or two,
          withdraw.
The world will have put on a thin gold
          mask.

The poet has made the novelist over in his own image, his very different image: not an anchor but a mask, not the depths but the surface. So perfectly does this image of gilding capture Merrill's artistic goals that he resorts to it, or to versions of it, many times in his poetry: “A changing light is deepening, is changing / To a gilt ballroom chair a chair / Bound to break under someone before long”; “under water all / Becomes a silvery weightless miracle”; “I saw the parents and the child / At their window, gleaming like fruit / With evening's mild gold leaf.”

Reading such lines, it is easy to see why Merrill has often been dismissed as a merely decorative poet, an aesthete playing with form. The charge seems all the more credible because of his great wealth: in the old American contest between paleface and redskin, Merrill's money and status place him firmly in the first camp. The son of a founder of Merrill Lynch, he was as close as his time could show to an American aristocrat, more privileged in any material sense than New England scions such as Henry James or Robert Lowell. (It is suggestive of his family's position that, in “Days of 1935,” he remembers fantasizing, as an eight-year-old, about being held for ransom like the Lindbergh baby.)

Merrill passed unscathed through a Depression childhood, and in his adult life he enjoyed the fruits of his father's labor: leisure, travel, beautiful homes. In her brief new memoir [Familiar Spirits] of Merrill and his companion David Jackson—a small but honest tribute that is not afraid to reveal the tensions that troubled their long friendship—Alison Lurie remembers the air of moneyed ease that surrounded the pair in the 1950s: “I loved visiting Stonington. To go to 107 Water Street from a house cluttered with shabby, worn furniture and toys and dirty laundry and the cries of children was like being transported to another world: one not only more attractive, but more luxurious, calm, voluptuous; more free and leisured—a world in which the highest goods were friendship, pleasure, and art.”

“Luxurious” is also an apt description of Merrill's Collected Poems, a large volume that brings together twelve published collections, as well as some previously uncollected poems and translations. The book is a testament to Merrill's unwavering sense of calling, to his patience and his integrity: in a life in which anything was possible, he wanted only to write poetry. It is also a reminder that, from the death of Elizabeth Bishop in 1979 until his own death in 1995, there was no American poet more artistically serious than Merrill. He has made the perilous crossing into posterity, and he has survived.

If the fact of Merrill's achievement is clear, however, its exact quality and its proper stature are not at all clear. The fear of giving hostages to the Philistines has prevented a recognition that his poetry is, finally and even consciously, superficial; it is profoundly concerned with surfaces. This is its strength and its considerable limitation. This fact of Merrill's art is often euphemized by calling him a comic poet or a Mozartian poet. But such appellations are misleading if they suggest that Merrill was artistically happy, that his gifts found free and ideal expression in his chosen forms and subjects. The Collected Poems only intermittently gives the sense of a complete achievement. Like a Renaissance fresco painter, Merrill often seems to lay his brilliant colors onto a weak and crumbling material; his themes are rarely equal to the language in which he clothes them. He presents the spectacle, rare in the last two centuries, of a serious poet whose language outstrips what he has to say.

To appreciate the limits of Merrill's achievement, it is necessary to understand the substance of that achievement. We might begin with one of the most notable features of this big book, Merrill's puns. He ties hundreds of comic knots in the English language:

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks. …
I'm at an airport, waiting. The scar itches.
Carving, last month I nearly removed
          my thumb.
Where was my mind? Lapses like this
          become
Standard practice. Not all of them
          leave me in stitches.
On the one hand, the power and the gory
Details. …
The god at last indifferent
And she no longer chaste
but continent.

In life, the pun receives the tribute of a groan; we feel that there is something cheap about drawing our attention to the arbitrary resemblances and double meanings of words. “Continent” means both “a landmass” and “sexually controlled,” but we learn nothing about the world from this accidental fact. Yet it is just this arbitrariness that makes Merrill's puns genuinely poetic: they willfully divert our attention from the signified to the sign, to the materiality of language. If language were entirely transparent, if there were one word per object, there could be no poetry; it is in the resistance or the excess of the medium that poetic felicity resides.

In this sense, the pun is really just the extreme case of a playfulness at work in all verse. As the eighteenth-century poet John Dennis wrote, “Rime may not so absurdly be said to be the Pun of Harmony.” Rhyme asserts that two words do sound the same, just as puns remind us that one word does have two meanings, regardless of logic. When rhyme-words are extremely disparate in meaning or etymology, they come to seem like puns on one another, as in Don Juan. Or as in Merrill: “peacocks / Orthodox,” “sacerdotal / Aristotle”; “one of us / homunculus.” He is so much under the spell of sound that his poems occasionally lose themselves in little epiphanies of assonance, as in a well-known passage from “Flying from Byzantium”:

Up spoke the man in the moon:
What does that moan mean?
The plane was part of the plan.
Why gnaw the bone of a boon?
I said with spleen, “Explain
These nights that tie me in knots,
All drama and no dream,
While you lampoon my pain.”

Merrill takes an almost mischievous pleasure in showing that sonic patterning can be taken to such an extreme while still making sense. His metrical repertory is extraordinarily wide: the elaborate stanzas of his early work, sonnet sequences, short epigrams, narrative couplets. (Almost the only thing that Merrill did not write was actual songs—an interesting difference from Auden, whom he otherwise resembles in this respect.) He gives the reader a sense of linguistic riches so vast that he can strew them carelessly about.

But Merrill's very liberality can be a flaw if we being to suspect that, like a Weimar fortune, it is a result of the cheapness of the currency. A poet gives the impression of strength only if his linguistic powers seem to meet and to overcome the challenge of a significant statement. Simple things said simply are graceful; difficult things said with difficulty are impressive; but simple things said with difficulty are merely showy. At times, Merrill consciously tests this imbalance, as when he describes urinating in The Book of Ephraim:

When the urge
Comes to make water, a thin brass-hot
          stream,
Sails out into the updraft, spattering
One impotent old tree that shakes its
          claws.
The droplets atomize, evaporate
To dazzlement a blankness overdusts
Pale blue, then paler blue. It stops at
          nothing.

The passage is carefully constructed, from the striking adjective “brass-hot” to the concluding pun. What it lacks is any kind of surprise, any sense that the poet is urging his subject beyond itself; and absent this pressure, it is just an unusually pretty description of pissing. And the prettiness is complacent, as we can see in Merrill's “dazzlement”: the word is too pleased with itself, with the mild frisson of being applied to something so trivial.

Moments such as this are very common in the Collected Poems. Merrill often seems to alter Dickinson's advice: he tells the facts, but tells them slant. We can see a minor instance in a line of “From the Cupola”: “Old headlines mend a missing pane.” Merrill is describing a window covered with newspaper, but through synecdoche he creates a little puzzle, an easily solved obliquity. Elsewhere the same habit of mind turns whole poems into pegs on which to hang the poetry, as in “Arabian Night”:

Features unseen embers and tongs once
          worried
bright as brass, cool, trim, of a depth to
          light the
way at least who, trusting mirages,
          find in
them the oasis,
what went wrong? You there in the
          mirror, did our
freshest page get sent to the Hall of
          Cobwebs?
Or had Rime's Emir all along been merely
          after your body?

As a description of looking into a mirror, this seems grotesquely overdone. It is, indeed, a kind of Gongorism, reminiscent of Cowley or Crashaw, but more likely showing the influence of French Symbolist poetry. This is one of the many occasions in Merrill when, as he writes in “Verse for Urania,”

such considerations as rhyme and meter
Prevail, it might be felt, at the expense
Of meaning. …

To object to such a style is not, I think, an objection to beautiful writing. It is an objection to decadent writing. The distinction must be maintained, because Merrill himself often elided it; he often wrote as if the only argument to be made against his manner of complexity were a plebeian political attack. We find such a self-defense in section “W” of The Book of Ephraim, the first part of his Ouija-inspired epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. In terza rima, Merrill relates a Dantesque meeting with Wendell, a painter whose subjects are “ill-knit / Mean-mouthed, distrustful” faces. Merrill asks why he creates such ugly portraits:

“I guess that's sort of how
          I see mankind,”
Says Wendell. “Doomed,
          sick, selfish, dumb as
          shit.
They talk about how
          decent, how refined—
All it means is, they can
          afford somehow
To watch what's happening,
          and not to mind.”
Our famous human dignity? I-Thou?
The dirty underwear of overkill.
Those who'll survive it were rethought
          by Mao
Decades past, as a swarming blue anthill.
“The self was once,” I put in, “a great,
          great
Glory.” And he: “Oh sure. But is it still?”

Merrill presents himself as the defender of aristocratic humanism against the modern tide of ugliness, brutality, mass thought. As he writes in another poem, “Form's what affirms.”

Yet if we ask what Merrill's form affirms, the answer can only be: form itself. His idea of art is a throwback, it often seems, to the 1890s, to l'art pour l'art. It is not surprising to read, in “Days of 1941 and '44,” that his first literary enthusiasms were for Wilde and Baudelaire:

But viewed from deep in my initial
Aesthetic phase, brought like a
          lukewarm bath to
Fizzy life by those mauve salts,
Paradises (and if artificial
So much the better) promised more
          than Matthew
Arnold. Faith rose dripping from
          the false.

Merrill's juvenile “alliterations courtesy of Wilde” were shed over time, but the Wildean idea of beauty remained. Merrill instinctively thinks of the beautiful as though it were an iridescence that can be peeled off any art object. There is a revealing moment in his prose memoir, A Different Person, when he writes of his discovery of early Christian mosaics in Ravenna:

The profusion of motifs, their vigor by now a reflex long past thought, gives out a sense of peace and plenty in the lee of history's howling gale. It isn't the creeds or crusades they tell of, but the relative eternity of villas, interior decoration, artisans. … While empires fell offstage, these happy solutions to the timeless problems of scale and coherence stretched, like flowers to the light, wherever a patron beckoned.

It is not the history, or the symbolism, or indeed the meaning of the mosaics that interests Merrill, but their “solutions” to technical “problems.”

To defend the aesthetic in these terms is, ironically, to abandon what is most genuinely beautiful in poetry. The particular heroism of modern poets since Wordsworth lies in the courage of their self-scrutiny, and in their boldness in expressing what they have learned. To this end, what Leavis called “heuristic poetry” uses form in a destructive-creative way, breaking down conventional or received modes of expression in order to build up new, more accurate modes. Merrill is not a poet of discovery, in this sense. His idea of beauty is static, exterior, and therefore basically conservative.

He provides a perfect emblem of this sort of beauty in “Charles on Fire,” where a glass of “amber liquor” is set aflame:

A blue flame, gentle, beautiful,
          came, went
Above the surface. In a hush
          that fell
We heard the vessel crack.
          The contents drained
As who should step down from
          a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening
hand
          All at once gloved itself in eeriness.

This, of course, is another version of the “thin gold mask”—a superficial glamour. It is significant that Merrill describes the flame as “beautiful,” a word that has been steadfastly avoided by most modern poets, on the assumption that real beauty does not need an epithet. But the tag is necessary in this case, because the phenomenon described is inherently nugatory: it means nothing, it discovers nothing. That is, it is not truly beautiful, with the exigent beauty of the best poetry; it is only pretty, or “interesting,” which is a purely aesthetic category.

Merrill's style is not able to create a more primordial beauty. The deficiency becomes clear whenever he attempts large statement:

Tell me something, Art.
You know what it's like
Awake in your dry hell
Of volatile synthetic solvents.
Won't you help us brave the elements
Once more, of terror, anger, love?

This passage, from “Dreams about Clothes,” cannot vivify the old abstractions of art, terror, anger, love. They are moved about like familiar counters, and so the poet, almost in spite of himself, can only treat them ironically. And we can observe the same limitation in “Farewell Performance,” in which the scattering of a friend's ashes is compared to a concert:

Back they come. How you would have
          loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done
          with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle
          forward
eager to hail them. …

Pity and terror, the Aristotelian formula, is in silent quotation marks; the emotion is alluded to rather than represented. It is as though Merrill's love for the particular has left him helpless before the universal, whose recreation surely is the highest attainment of poetry.

When the valuable is identified with the rare and the precious, rather than with the common and the profound, it makes sense that the poet will see himself as addressing a select audience. Merrill was an exceptionally generous person (Lurie writes that “no one will ever know the extent” of his benefactions), but in his poetry he has an exaggerated sense of his own particularity, his separation from the rest of the world, which can border on snobbery. In “Tony: Ending the Life,” he writes of

The longing to lead everybody's life
—Lifelong daydream of precisely those
Whom privilege or talent set apart:
How to atone for the achieved
          uniqueness?

Nothing could be more alien to the self-conception of the “heuristic” poet, who is essentially representative of mankind, even if he lives among them as a stranger. In lines such as these, one suspects that the idea of material privilege has infected the idea of artistic talent, which is not a privilege but a responsibility.

Merrill's feeling of exclusivity, his sense of being “set apart,” can be deeply unattractive. Consider “Bronze,” a poem about a friend who has died, leaving a house behind:

          His last will
Left it intact to Mario the butler,
So long devoted and his brood so great.
The house sighed. It had entertained
          the subtler
Forms of discourse and behavior.

We see it also in another form in A Different Person, when Merrill reflects on his love affairs with Greek boys, conducted over decades of part-time residence in Athens.

And the Greek youths we take up with? Don't they have personalities themselves, and histories? No doubt; yet it seems to us that they primarily have humors, choleric or melancholy, sanguine or phlegmatic, as in pre-Renaissance psychology. Also our friends strike us as creations of their Mediterranean society far more than we are of ours. …

But nowhere is this attitude more evident than in The Changing Light at Sandover, which purports to document metaphysical truths communicated via a Ouija board to Merrill and David Jackson. As Merrill began “talking” with a spirit named Ephraim, Alison Lurie looked on with dismay: “From the beginning I didn't care for Ephraim. He was a part of David and Jimmy I hadn't met head-on before, and instantly felt estranged from. He was foreign, frivolous, intermittently dishonest, selfishly sensual, and cheerfully, coldly promiscuous.” Indeed, The Book of Ephraim presents a depressingly narcissistic vision of the world to come.

Merrill allows that Ephraim might have been “a projection / Of what already burned, at some obscure / Level or another, in our skulls”; but it is hardly reassuring to think that passages like the following are addressed by Merrill to himself:

take our teacher told us
from sensual pleasure only what will not
          during it be even partly spoiled by fear
          of losing too much
This was the tone
We trusted most, a smiling Hellenistic
Lightness from beyond the grave. Each
          shaft
Feathered by head-turning flattery:
Long b4 the fortunate conjunction
(David's and mine) allowed me to get
          through
may I say weve had our eyes on u
—On our kind hearts, good sense,
          imagination,
Talents!

The Book of Ephraim contains some of Merrill's finest writing, but the system that it is meant to expound is intellectually unacceptable and imaginatively complacent. It is not necessary, of course, to write a long poem in order to be a major poet; but there are qualities of the major poet whose absence from Merrill's work is confirmed in his long poem. There is more discovery, and therefore more beauty, in the brief and homely Collected Poems of Larkin than in the many golden pages of Merrill.

Still, Merrill is an undisputed master of certain modes. The aesthetic-aristocratic irony that freezes his largest statements is very rewarding when he writes about his childhood or his love affairs, subjects on which many poets are hysterically single-minded. Indeed, it is not his style, but the tone that his style creates, that is Merrill's greatest achievement. The man whom we come to know in the Collected Poems is witty, clever, cool, urbane; he meets suffering with a self-mocking fortitude. The resigned “Ja, ja” of Strauss's Marschallin is Merrill's characteristic response to tragedy:

Change of scene that might, I thought,
          be tried
First, instead of outright suicide.
(Looked back on now, what caused my
          sufferings?
Mere thwarted passion—commonest
          of things.)

In fact, some of Merrill's best poems are about opera. As he relates in the sequence “Matinées,” attending a performance of the Ring was the beginning of his aesthetic education. Opera taught him that emotion can be performed, that it can be simultaneously sincere and parodic. The artistic consciousness is inevitably a double consciousness:

The point thereafter was to arrange for
          one's
Own chills and fever, passions and
          betrayals,
Chiefly in order to make song of them.

The image of the opera singer, whose rehearsed emotion is paradoxically more real than actual feeling, returns in “The Ring Cycle,” a sequence from A Scattering of Salts, Merrill's last collection:

Brünnhilde confronts Siegfried. That is
          to say,
Two singers have been patiently
          rehearsed
So that their tones and attitudes convey
Outrage and injured innocence. …

Merrill's autobiographical sequences—“Matinées,” “The Broken Home,” “The Thousand and Second Night,” “Lost in Translation,” the series of poems titled “Days of …,” “Clearing the Title,” and a few others—are the height of his art. Here Merrill finds a subject important enough to compel interest but not so important as to resist irony; and the pressure of his narrative restrains his tendency to the baroque. These are the poems that will be read when Merrill the individual is forgotten.

Perhaps the best of these sequences is “Family Week at Oracle Ranch,” from A Scattering of Salts. It recounts the poet's trip to a New Age recovery facility to visit his lover, who was a patient there. Here the disparity between complex language and primal feeling becomes Merrill's explicit subject:

Simplicities. Just seven words—Afraid,
Hurt, Lonely, etc.—to say it with.
Shades of the first watercolor box
(I “felt blue,” I “saw red”). …
While the connoisseur of feeling throws
          up his hands:
Used to depicting personal anguish
With a full palette—hues, oils, glazes,
          thinner—
He stares into these withered wells
          and feels,
Well … Sad and Angry?

For a poet so enamored of eloquence, therapeutic language represents a radical deprivation; yet this very loss allows Merrill a way around the ironic self-awareness that his language enforces. It is the first time that Merrill appears discomfited by language, by the disjunction between eloquence and communication. That it came at the very end of his life makes it especially poignant, a token of possibilities never to be realized.

Reading the Collected Poems leaves no doubt that Merrill was one of the finest American poets of the last half-century. His achievement was all the more valuable because he was strong in areas where most of his contemporaries were weak. Yet the book also leaves the suspicion that Merrill's major work was left unwritten. How glad we would be to have, instead of The Changing Light at Sandover, his verse autobiography. It would probably not have been a profound exploration of memory or psychology, like The Prelude, or like Proust; but it would have been sparkling, sociable, eighteenth-century, like Pope.

Indeed, the Augustan age would have been the perfect setting for Merrill's gifts. He was meant for an era in which the poet could take much for granted—his audience, his principles, his forms—and could devote himself to the perfection of what he received. One can well imagine Merrill going to court and to the coffeehouses, writing racy verse epistles, and turning his couplets to a glittering sheen. There would have been no question, in those days, of his poetry being too beautiful to be great.