James Merrill

First published in 1957, this book details the important part that the sea power played in winning the Civil War."In the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in the Civil War reflected in an avalanche of Civil War novels, biographies, and monographs. The writers responsible for this torrent have for the most part focused attention on the battlefields, the halls of Congress, the economics of war, and the actors, big and small. The...

The volume that brings together, for the first time, the complete works of one of the giants of American poetry. Merrill touched each of his subjects, whether worldly or spiritual, with silvery wit and metrical music. A bracing glass of ouzo, afternoons at the gym with a gay partner, conversations with deceased friends via the Ouija board, a midnight swim -- all were occasions for contemplation and high art. Here are all the poems -- from his earliest...

This new Selected Poems replaces an earlier selection of work by James Merrill entitled From the First Nine (1982), now out of print; it includes 121 poems taken from that work and from Late Settings (1985), but it excludes the long narrative poem The Changing Light at Sandover, which is republished simultaneously in a separate volume. Together the two give solid definition to a body of poetic work that must be accounted among the finest in English...

James Merrill has come to be regarded as one of the outstanding American poets of the 20th century with the publication of his Changing Light at Sandover, a grand, narrative poem in its complete form, and From the First Nine, Poems 1946-1976, a full selection from his first nine books of poems. In Late Settings he has produced another book of poems of the greatest distinction. Included in this collection is a set of six poems called "From the Cutting-room...

James Merrill himself once called his body of work "chronicles of love and loss," and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life--comic and haunting, exotic and domestic--to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment.