In Merrill's verse there is … something curiously old-fashioned—at least at first glance. In his wielding of poetic forms, Merrill is masterful…. Like his mentor Auden, Merrill can be so conversationally civilized in these forms that only half way through them does the reader suspect the strictness of the design. (pp. 9-10)

Here's another way in which Merrill is old-fashioned: he never courts obscurity…. These are books of ideas (as well as of feelings, visions, people and personages), and the ideas are comprehensible. Whereas Eliot's ideas about tradition or Pound's economic theories are stated in clear, no-nonsense formulations only in their essays, the poetry acting as a dramatization (sometimes a fragmentation) of the thought, Merrill's epics are as straightforward as Pope's Essays. Nor are the cultural or scientific allusions in Merrill obscure….

Merrill has more trust in the transcendental power of language than almost any other contemporary poet. He believes that words do convey messages, that a line is a mix-and-match ensemble pieced together out of reliable signifiers….

[For] readers to "get" Merrill they must believe (or pretend to believe) in conventional communication. Only so can they enjoy or even understand his strategies—his habit of breaking off a though once it's become obvious, his skillful manipulation of readers' sympathies, his direct address to the reader, his speculations about the "real" meanings that underlie the words of his informants, his unearthing of the wisdom stored up in puns (Merrill once said that the "collective unconscious of the race is the O.E.D.")—his complete faith, in short, in the transmitting and recuperative powers of language. The paradox that such realism is applied, in "Ephraim" and Mirabell, to the occult in no way detracts, I think, from my argument. Indeed, these books can be read as subtle propaganda, inducting the skeptical reader into heavenly mysteries. (p. 10)

Moreover, every revelation in Mirabell can be read analogically or metaphorically. Thus the black holes in space, the reservoirs of antimatter, correspond to a will to nothingness in mankind. Similarly, the lattice-like, crust world created by the bats over Atlantis corresponds to the cortex in the human brain. God Biology is both a deity—and the accumulated wisdom in our cells. The bats are eerie intelligences, agents in competition and collaboration with nature—and also aspects of the atom.

Nor does Mirabell lack emotion or dramatic tension. Revelations are teased out of the bats and vouchsafed in tantalizing morsels….

[In] Mirabell we see the past literally projected forward into the future as souls, like actors "between engagements," prepare for their next lives. The looming, troubling fathers who stand behind their sons are now regulated into a system of patrons and representatives. The bats, like inspiration, adjust the density of a soul and create new substances out of familiar materials. Merrill has always had an agile imagination open to analogy; in Mirabell analogue becomes anagoge….

Even the moral atmosphere of the previous poems—at once humane and exacting—is codified in Mirabell, not always comfortably. Just as Nabokov contrasts his aristocratic, passionate characters with a troupe of fools, prudes, psychologists, villains and spoilsports and the resulting effect is both romantic and satiric, in the same way Merrill's verse is electric with the alternating currents of sympathy and scorn. In Mirabell, however, the scorn can become cruel, the snobbishness no longer temperamental but political, the affection smug—the only fault I can find in this work, a fault, mind you, that has characterized almost all the great poetry of this century….

Together "The Book of Ephraim" and Mirabell form the first two-thirds of the most ambitious poem of our day, one that attempts to restore to restore to verse the subjects, public and private, that an adult mind actually thinks about: our place in the universe, our fate, our origin, Our virtues and sins….

Mirabell marks a new turn in Merrill's work, a translation of personal history and verbal ingenuity into history and cosmic engineering. He has written "poems of science" and indeed established the poetic equivalent to the scientific picture of the universe in which time and space are relative, in which energy and mass are convertible into one another, in which the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, in which nothing, not even the smallest wave or particle, is ever subject to a stable description but all, all plunges outward in a shift towards red—to be read. (p. 11)