[Divine Comedies: Poems] is a verse not orphaned but fully parented in the flesh and the spirit, suckled, if not by Woolf, by a crowd of others. Yeats and Stevens, Kafka, Proust, Auden, Izak Dinesen, Brünnhilde, Tadzio, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag—past presences, real and fictional, pervade [Merrill's] poetry. Highly seasoned and anything but anonymous, it is in some important sense serene, with the serenity of those who can still experience history, personal and public, as properly occasioning love and honor….

Fun, of course, is to be expected from comedies, but who today expects to realize expectations? Dante (the celestial mechanics of whose tour of the spheres Merrill will casually explain) certainly did not promise fun. Nevertheless the parallel Merrill's title asserts has more than the customary ironic validity. Dante is the most personal of poets, relying on those he had loved and honored to guide him through the universe, memorializing in rich human particularity the history, poetry, philosophy, the politics, the geography of his public and private world. Merrill's Comedies are similarly rooted. Like Dante, like Yeats too, Merrill makes his poetry out of events and people whose primary significance is that they have happened to him or that he has cared about them. It is a significance which, if the poet is good enough, is sufficient for us all…. Taking place over nearly twenty years (1955–74, Eisenhower to Watergate) the poem compasses the poet's own maturing and binds the generations. The huge cast of characters includes babies and adolescents as well as the youngish, the aging, the old, the dying, and the dead. Like Dante he secures his events in time. Dates are placed where we can find them, for it's by the calendar that we must grasp time's passage…. For Dante and Yeats personal experience leads beyond itself to, literally, another world, and Merrill's testimony, like theirs, is that that world is inherently personal. And for Merrill too the praise and interest of the other world is tempered by his unregenerate attachment to the things of this one. (p. 181)

[Merrill offers] persons and places and events perceived through the affections and rendered in orders and textures of language which affirm their value for the poet, and so for us. In this as in other ways Merrill has chosen to honor tradition…. Dante, like all the great narrative poets, lets us know clearly where he starts from, whom he proceeds with, what goes on—basic clarities which sustain us to attempt the incidental riddles and enjoy them. Merrill, though he's no more than Dante an easy poet, gives us all the clues we need to follow him through a poem of many riddles and many settings. Dante named every river in Italy. Merrill gives us Kandy, Kyoto, Kew, Geneva, Santa Fe, Venice, the papyrus swamps of the Nile, the South African veldt and, as exotic as any, Purgatory, Okla., where young Temerlin's educated chimp-child Miranda makes Merrill the sign for "happy" and charms him with a great open-jawed kiss…. Merrill, like Yeats and unlike Dante, has had to make his own myth. No wonder his narrative holds the attention; it's about reincarnation and communion with the cherished dead. (pp. 181-82)

Merrill's Comedies are well named. Where death is not accepted as final it is hard to sustain a sense of tragedy. But euphoria, too, passes. By the end of the poem Ephraim no longer comes, or the aging companions no longer summon him. Tempora mutantur; so do we. For all the frivolity, Merrill announced his theme at once in A: "the incarnation and withdrawal of a god."

     We've modulated. Keys ever remoter
     Lock our friend among the golden things that go
     Without saying, the loves no longer called up
     Or named.

Keys of music, keys that secure treasure—the play of language is for pleasure. But these persistent puns are more—they are the poet's testimony to an ancient faith, the faith in the profound significances handed us by the adventitious and the random. It is not merely incidental that Merrill reveals himself as a virtuoso of trope and form, blank verse his common speech, developing sonnets as casually as the rest of us stammer, sliding imperceptibly into couplets, "loose talk tightening into verse." He can toss off a whole narrative section in sonnets; he casts his meeting with WENDELL P in supple terza rima, even ending, as Dante ended his canticles, with the word "stars."… But Merrill's faith is even more profoundly traditional: the faith that appearances and chance connections are upheld by correspondences no earthly poet has created. If our varied "languages"—his quotation marks—"bird-flight, // Hallucinogen, chorale, and horoscope" are all "facets of the universal gem," randomness is only apparent. Dante, whose terza rima mirrored the Trinity, would have found the idea wholly familiar; Renaissance cabalists would have seen nothing singular in making the letters of the alphabet an organizing principle. Merrill's virtuosity, while offering us all the traditional pleasures, remains a means, not an end. The end—even more profoundly traditional—is to mirror experienced truth….

In Q, a prose section of personally significant Quotations, Merrill for once transmits Ephraim's message raw and unversified: & NOW ABOUT DEVOTION IT IS I AM FORCED TO BELIEVE THE MAIN IMPETUS Indeed; as Dante learned, it moves the sun and the other stars. Or in Merrill's own exquisite image, what ties us to the dust is "the tough tendril / Of unquestioning love alone." We owe him our gratitude for risking his credentials as a modernist to show us that poetry still offers its old-fashioned pleasures. These poems, in language we can remember and possess, are testimony to an achieved web of values both transcendent and human. (p. 183)