Tentative in title, cannily ambiguous in structure and content, [Scripts for the Pageant] are no more ambiguous in spirit, no less committedly affirmative, than the Paradiso to which they are already being compared. (p. 532)

To have the poem now completed is like the reception of an immense, unhoped-for present: the long poem that it's been proved a hundred times over we can't expect in this age of anxiety, privatism, fragmentation and the loss of the confidence and will to speak any public language…. At its completion Merrill, like Prospero, breaks the mirror that has been since Ephraim the symbol of his poetic field, as well as what it was in actuality, the central focus of the room where his spirits gathered. He does not drown his book, however, but leaves it for us to read and live with….

The trilogy [commencing with Ephraim and Mirabell] is sufficiently unlike the literature of the last sixty years, the best and the worst, that we need have no trouble recognizing its differences. In the midst of fragmentation, it unifies—science and poetry, past and present, public and private, cosmic and domestic, the dead and the living—as epic used to, as no short poem can. In the midst of literature (and lives) made out of heartsick discontinuities, it is continuous, with the continuity not only of reason—purposeful narrative, tightly connected event—but of the heart—of loyalty, friendship, of love that so yearns for continuity that it seeks it beyond even that black discontinuity that JM and DJ refuse to take as final. In the midst of personal and linguistic privatism, it manifests for the reader an affectionate concern that we'd forgotten could exist in serious literature, and a shining faith in the power of language to render shareable our grandest imaginations and our most personal experience, to make the private public.

Public, not popular. These Divine Comedies (as must not the final, three-part assemblage eventually be called?) will not be that. But they will reach that same enduring public that learned its way to sharing Dante's experience—not the credulous, the Castaneda-freaks and horoscope-watchers to whom its apparatus initially might seem to appeal but all those who care enough about the pleasures and responsibilities of life and language to do the work (and play) of reading a poem extraordinary enough that its author well might think—as Dante and Milton thought—that in some decisive way it came from Somewhere Else. And if it didn't, Merrill's flipped coin still comes up heads. What a piece of work is man, out of whose hot and busy brain heaven, purgatory and paradise can spin themselves?…

[The] language here dazzles against the dark. It also, as appropriate, glitters, glistens, glimmers, glints, or glows, as well as bringing off a great many other special effects I lack alliterative verbs for. (p. 533)

Merrill's wordplay is [inseparable] from his highest seriousness; only as I write do I perceive that it manages to embody what the whole poem is about: brightness and death, the loved human being and the flashing revelations of language.

And the verse! "Make it new!" Merrill can do anything with these old forms we've been told so often are outworn. This poem should reinstate the study of prosody in the English curriculum. Sonnets crystallize so effortlessly out of his narrative pentameter that we often don't realize we're reading them. (pp. 533-34)

[The] poem proceeds, a succession of songs of creation and destruction—individuals and species and civilizations destroyed, buried, but over them (and this in the lessons of NO) A WREATH OF GREEN STRONGER THAN ANY BLACK….

This is too rich a poem for review; commentators will be at work for years to come, MAKING SENSE OF IT. But we are in at the beginning. So forget all this, get the books, and make your own discoveries. (p. 535)