[If one uses] the usual domestic routines, illnesses, visits, weather, a problem with wallpaper, a failure of the telephone, you have enough, given Mr. Merrill's inventiveness, to make a poem of 80 or 90 pages….

His common style is a net of loose talk tightening to verse, a mode in which nearly anything can be said with grace….

"The Book of Ephraim" gave inspiration a new life by providing lines not only ghost-ridden but, at least in some measure, ghost-written.

With "Mirabell," something went wrong…. [The] real misfortune is that JM is instructed to write a poetry of Science…. Unfortunately, 741 does not warn JM of the risks attendant upon trying to out-Auden Auden…. [You] can't rival Auden by turning popular science into verse. (p. 11)

I am afraid "Scripts for the Pageant" persists in the portentousness and vanity of "Mirabell." Its subject is nothing less than the meaning of life, but the poem degrades the theme and makes a poor show of itself with camp silliness and giggling….

"Scripts for the Pageant" hasn't enough wind in its sails, chiefly because it relies upon the ripples of demeanor in the appalling absence of conviction….

True, there are good things in the poem, a few jewels available for the labor of sifting the rubble. The opening of the "Samos" section is beautiful, its splendor the direct consequence of the fact that the poet is speaking in his own voice. And again, 70 pages later, he writes wonderfully of the house in Athens. These passages are heart-breaking, as compelling as anythinng James Merrill has written since "Up and Down" in "Braving the Elements." But it is wretched to have to cross such a dismal terrain to reach them. (p. 20)