Ouija? Heavenly messengers? Their appearance will not surprise readers of Merrill's Divine Comedies (1976). In that work, the poet told of bizarre communications that he and his companion, David Jackson, had received over a 20-year period from "Ephraim"—a 1st-century Hellenistic Jew who claimed to have been a slave at the court of Tiberius….

Through him,… JM and DJ were able to contact dead friends, in particular two quasi-parental figures: W. H. Auden, Merrill's poetic mentor, and Maria Mitsotáki, whom Merrill once addressed as "the Muse of my offdays" (The Firescreen, 1969). Such a high comic romp was rather startling after the previous "chronicles of love and loss." Still, it was undeniable that in shaking the burdens of nostalgia and regret, the poet's voice deepened with impressive authority.

Now it turns out that "The Book of Ephraim" was merely a curtain-raiser for Mirabell's more solemn masque. Mysterious powers who "SPEAK FROM WITHIN THE ATOM" … have come to tell of the dangers of atomic energy. (p. 14)

[The] general movement of Mirabell manages to metamorphosize the ordinary, the trivial, the ridiculous into the sublime. Enter 741, a gentle bat, who conducts a seminar on the new religion of symbolic language. In the process, his four pupils—JM, DJ, Maria, and Wystan—teach him about human manners, which elevate us above the animal world, and he is transformed into a peacock. JM names him "Mirabell," after the romantic hero of Congreve's The Way of the World. To celebrate the newfound faith, there is a picnic of words—a love feast or agape, introduced by Auden, whose much-missed voice Merrill resurrects with uncanny fidelity….

Lest readers get the impression that Mirabell is chiefly devoted to the exposition of dubious metaphysics, I hasten to note that no summary can convey the variety or cohesion of its dramatic changes. A matter as frivolous as redecorating a room turns out to have cosmic significance. There are numberless subplots, each more delightful than the last. One involves the horrifying discovery by the late poet, Chester Kallman, that he is to be reborn as an African political leader; another relates how the spirit of Rimbaud ghostwrote The Waste Land. Akhnaton and his Queen Nefertiti, doomed by love and pride, provide what Merrill mockingly styles "Nuits de Cleopatrè." Instruction in science, history and theology, Arabian Nights stories, arguments and debates are all interwoven with "set pieces"—lyrical poems of exquisite musicality, reminiscent of the songs in Goethe's Faust. There is something for everyone, yet it all forms a unity, bonded like those atoms the poem celebrates.

Perhaps the most powerful enchantment of the book is the vividness and charm of its characters. The angels are radiantly otherworldly; the bats frighteningly so, except for the humane Mirabell….

What, then, of the "poems of science"? When his voices tell Merrill that "MAN'S TERMITE PALACE BEEHIVE ANTHILL PYRAMID JM IS LANGUAGE," they assume our ability to accept a metaphor that compares structures collectively built by social insects to human culture….

Nevertheless, the Muses of most poets today parade like the Madwoman of Chaillot, dressed in outmoded fashions of thought, ready to do single-handed battle against modernism. Mirabell, by contrast, is not afraid to tackle the problem head-on….

Merrill's celestial circus is a brilliant philosophy of metaphor—that "ritual of the new religion." At all times it is affirmed that there are no bats—spirits have no form. Maria explains that they are products of "the mind's eye," the imagination that must see an idea to conceive it. The poet's function is to translate the abstract into the vividly concrete. No reader of Mirabell will ever think of atoms quite the way he did before encountering the personifications of their forces. Yet after all the grotesques, arabesques, human interest, we become more sophisticated, and are prepared for the unadorned revelation of the angels.

James Merrill has created a poem as central to our generation as The Waste Land was to the one before us. (p. 15)