Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.
Readers who are neither professors nor
poets are likely to stress the communication function of literature at the
expense of its essential aesthetic role.
At its most vulgar this tendency appears when a schoolteacher asks a
class “What is the poet trying to say?” Scholars,
too, are accustomed to tease out meaning – political, psychological, spiritual
– from artistic texts as though these are subjects about which the writer may
educate the reader. While such inquiries
are not altogether groundless, the fact is, of course, that the only field in
which artists are expert is likely to be art.
In essence, art is self-justifying play.
All arts rise from people entertaining themselves and others by
performing recreational symbolic manipulation.
Among the chief pleasures of this universal human activity is the
experience of beauty in formally structured patterns, patterns of sound, of
meaning, of color and movement, patterns satisfying for their own sake,
regardless of reference to anything in lived experience.
The role of formal beauty in art is
evident in forms like dance, music, and abstract painting but it is never
absent from literature as well. One
advantage of critical discussion of theme is that the issues can often be more
or less demonstrable, whereas perception of beauty is ultimately
subjective. One may prove that a given
work has been considered beautiful by the best authorities for centuries, one
may document one’s own motives for applauding a poem’s form, yet it remains
impossible to force another to experience pleasure in consuming it.
This does not mean, however, that critics
do not present judgements of value. The
primary role of a journalistic book reviewer is evaluative, and more scholarly
commentators do not shrink from gauging aesthetic quality. Indeed, their opinions are often
spirited. In appraising the work of James
Merrill, many critics express an odd ambivalence. He is generally acknowledged to be one of the
finest American poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet
virtually all discussion of his work includes descriptive adjectives that
foreground the poet’s mastery of what Pound called melopoeia while
treating this skill as a weakness. Readers’
sensibilities are doubtless shaped by the fact that sound is the most neglected
aspect of poetry today.
In the years since Merrill’s First
Poems, poetry has proceeded ever further on the path toward prosiness and
the colloquial, and sound has been neglected to the point that it is
imperceptible to many readers. Like
Roethke and Lowell the fashions of the time led Merrill to loosen his practice
of prosody, yet from the start many readers found his work precious and
over-refined. Even in an era when
academic poetry governed most critics’ standards, these poems struck readers as
insufficiently vulnerable. Merrill
attracted curiously qualified praise in which his expertise was cause for
applause but also for suspicion.
This oddly ambiguous rhetorical pattern
describing Merrill emerges clearly from a perusal of New York Times
reviews of his books. The review of First Poems in the New
York Times heralded the book and called attention to the poet’s “superb
elegance” heralding “the rise of a new American formalism.” Yet the critic’s reservations, though muted,
were clear in the review’s title “Mannered World,” and his later reference to
the poet’s “highly-mannered style.” The Times’
next reviewer felt it necessary to mount a defense, asserting that “The verbal
elegance, and the Jamesian or Proustian world he draws his people and images
from, are neither frivolous nor precious.”
The third Times critic to treat Merrill’s poetry constructed a
miniature imaginative flight on the now familiar theme. “One could imagine him (or the persona of his
poems) aging into a perfectly dapper Henry James villain: a Gilbert Osmond, to
whom life consists of figurines to be manipulated. Brilliant, technically
flawless, terribly aloof, involved in their own artifice.” He finds, however,
in Water Street, an increased “humility,” as though the Christian
virtues had aesthetic currency. The
reviewer of Nights and Days balances Merrill’s “suavity and technical
polish” against a newfound “complexity of feeling,” noting in sum the same
bipolar opposition: “This poetry fascinates and exercises the intelligence as
much as it liberates the emotions.” The
commentator on The Fire Screen repeats the pattern. In an article titled “Traveler With a Trunk
of Poetic Devices,” he describes Merrill’s work as “elegant and cosmopolitan .
. . decorative, sumptuous, tinged with
world-weariness . . .rarified” and regards the most successful poem as that
least assertive of form, thus “freeing” the subject and “compelling it to speak for itself” unlike a
poem in a more demanding form which would hold “its subject still by enclosing
it in a complex frame.” Well after
Merrill’s death the theme continued, with the Times writer noting his
poetry’s “high, almost lacquered finish” and its “refinement, intricacy of
design and formal containment,” while regretting his being “in thrall to a
certain kind of poetic decorum.” He is
“a hopeless voluptuary when it comes to language” whose “hyper-refined style”
recalls the Decadents.” In short, he is “recherché”
due to the unfortunate tendency for his “gifts with language” to “become his
vice.” [1]
A procession of reviewers continued with the
same theme since, suggesting again and again that virtuoso technique, while worthy
of praise, yet was likely to signal some sort of emotional emptiness. A few further examples of this
all-but-universal judgement will suffice.
Secondary codes developed to imply this
sort of ambivalent assessment of Merrill’s achievement include references to
Wallace Stevens and to Mozart. Helen
Vendler, a partisan of Merrill’s oeuvre, after stating the opposition in
her title “Ardor and Artifice,” ensures its understanding by the subtitle “The
Mozartian touch of a master poet,” and proceeds to build her essay on it. She notes opponents of Merrill’s receiving
the 1973 Bollingen Prize had objected to his poetry, “a hermetic cultivation of
one's sensibility and a fastidious manipulation of received forms." Observing that the poet was consistently
accused of “snobbery, affectation, preciousness, artifice, perversity, and
elitism,” she enlists the author himself to concede that his early poems were a
"melodic, empty-headed fin de siècle sort of thing." [2]
One sympathetic reader says that Merrill
was a poet who preferred “wit over emotion,” who “embroidered his effects,
unable to let loose in a soulful voice.” [3] Another critic has felt it necessary to
rehabilitate First Poems though her appreciation is limited by calling
the poems “borrowed,” “an imitation” with “a cold, transparent medium
intervening between the self and the world,” “all dressed up without much of a
place to go,” and lacking “the animating spark of individual experience.” She even accuses the elegant Merrill of
“awkwardness.” [4]
As Vendler’s quotation of the poet’s own
self-denigrating characterization of his work suggests, Merrill had heard this
opinion commonly enough that he adopted it in part. In an untitled poem from 1972 (which he chose
to highlight with italics to indicate its significance in 1982) Merrill
characterizes his early work in a warm but somewhat condescending tone, rich in
aristocratic indulgence, using the most unassuming terms.
-- Not after all a work so vile
That portions even now aren’t guaranteed
To make the simplehearted read
And who know better, smile. [5]
The most that can be said of these
poems then is that they “blaze tinily,” and the awkward, slightly unusual
adverb reinforces the author’s humble pose.
Of course this is in effect nothing but an unusually gracefully
performed modesty topos, demonstrating rather than apologizing for
literary sophistication.
There can be doubt that Merrill is a
highly self-conscious practitioner who makes considerable use of both pure
sound as well as of montages of ideas and images. The care with which he builds his lines is
evident to the analyst. Merrill’s
mid-twentieth century reaction to the danger of meter and rhyme sounding
child-like, mechanical, insincere, or off-putting is not to abandon traditional
forms but to loosen them comfortably.
One need only open First
Poems and glance at “The Black Swan” (also the title of the poet’s first
chapbook, privately printed) to note the poet’s concern with form. The poem’s five stanzas are visually similar,
looking much like rhyme royal, an intriguing invitation to the reader much as
the entrance to a meticulously tended French-style garden beckons toward the
stroller. The number of feet per line
varies 5-3-5-5-5-3-4 (pentameter,
trimeter, pentameter, pentameter, pentameter, trimeter, tetrameter) and the
feet are basically iambic. Merrill said of
the iamb in general that “no other meter will do,” calling the foot “our
virtual birthright,” [6] but this basic backbeat is subject to considerable
variation. The rhyme scheme is always
AABCABC, but the rhymes are virtually always partial.
An appended chart provides the data, but
simply reading the text reveals his approach at once. Merrill has composed an elaborate stanza of
his own invention which is yet similar enough to earlier forms to seem natural,
yet it is clearly “modern” due to the considerable irregularity of the metrical
and rhyme patterns. A courtly dance is
in progress, but it is not one of absolutely predictable patterns. Merrill’s form is sufficiently complex that
the arrival of rhymes and the length of lines are often something of a surprise
in spite of the overall regularity.
The sound structure of the poem has an
appeal of its own, accessible even to a non-English speaker, yet the melody, as
always, is functional and expressive in support of meaning. As the present concern is not hermeneutic, a
few examples must suffice.
The poem begins not with an iamb but with
an arresting downbeat like the “Hwaet!” that opens Beowulf. The last line of that stanza is
hypercatalectic, i. e. adding a syllable, indicating in the pace the excitement
of the poet’s suspended “wonder.” The
fourth line of the second stanza includes an extra syllable in the second foot
corresponding to the “thing in itself,” an object then described in regular
feet. In the last seven lines of the
final stanza a regular pentameter is followed by a regular tetrameter and then
four lines more disordered in meter as the speaker accepts his relationship to
the extraordinary swan.
Meanwhile, the rhyme words squirm and turn,
differing with each other as much as they agree. Thus “lawns” and “swans” are all but
harmonious, while the word “draw,” with its increased difference, indicates the
problem poised by the “private chaos” that accompanies the fine bird. The effect is increased by the comparative
extent to which “splendor” and “wonder” and “wake” and “lake” consort well
together.
The expressive potential of Merrill’s
sound effects is secondary, though, to the altogether formal pleasure of
observing theme and variations, expectations satisfied or turned in the serial
experience of the reader or listener following the poem as it unfolds. With line lengths and rhymes in flux, yet
under the governance of an overall pattern, the poem is at once formally
elegant and unpredictable. Merrill
resembles in form the highly conventionalized yet ever-fresh structures of a
Bach fugue.
Those critics who find Merrill too skillful
a poet link this characteristic with a lack of affect, a deficiency in emotion,
yet “The Black Swan” ends, having passed through “wonder,” “pain,” and “grief,”
with a declaration both direct and passionate: “I love the black swan.” One need not venture far into biographical
details (he called his professor Kimon Friar “the black swan”) to see how in
fact he foregrounds feeling not only in his first book’s first poem, but
throughout his career and, incidentally, his life.
The theme is elaborated in “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards.” A tour de force with in six sections in
varying forms, each of them a sort of cabaret song detailing one variety of
love-longing, united by the opening and closing mentions of “sweet air,”
suggesting the goodness of life in spite of doubts, pains, regrets, and frozen
feet.
Two
eleven-syllable lines conclude section one after six with ten syllables each,
as the “hungering waves are both ornamented and limited by the thistle’s pain. The rhymes are tightly but irregularly
wrapped with an ABCBCADD pattern though a, b, and c all share the vowel-r sound. The d rhymes state the poem’s central tension,
the linkage of pain and pleasure, with the “pearl-eaters” a distant ideal of
satisfied desire.
The second section not only builds a
shapely self-contained verbal structure; it also plays against the first. Instead of the insistent if off-base rhyme
scheme of the first section there seem to be no end-rhymes at all (only the pleasant
internal echo of “rambler”/”brambles” in the first stanza) until the ninth line
when “blows”/”grows” comes as a surprise, only to be capped by the tenth line
which resounds rhyming fully with the fifth.
Lines five and ten are also each eleven rather than ten syllables in
length though in these stanzas twelve syllable lines appear as well.
The third section switches to shorter
lines suggesting children’s verse.
Doubtless to balance the expectation of heavily stressed meters and full
rhymes associated with the nursery. The
syllable count varies randomly from five to seven while rhymes are etiolated
almost out of recognition, with the first two being the ironic pair of “nursery”/”mercenary”
and the sinister one of “witches”/”matches.”
The light expectation associated with children’s poetry is belied by the
haunting third stanza in which people, like flowers, either “fall
helter-skelter” or, turning “wry like thistles,” like Keats’ bees in the Autumn
Ode, deceive themselves into believing that “each latest/ Is safest, is
sweetest.”
Four architectural octets, recalling the
septets of “The Black Swan” form the fourth section which shifts abruptly from
the nursery to the drawing room and the enactment of an ambiguous love
relationship in languorous lines recalling “Prufrock.” Here the half-rhymes again are regular in
their appearance ABABCDDC. The shapely
form of then stanzas is defined by the line lengths, basically pentameter with
lines one, two, three, five, six, and eight approximating pentameters (though
varying between ten and fourteen syllables) and lines four and seven trimeters
(between five and seven syllables).
The poet disorients his readers once more
with the fifth section, an unlikely representation of the pains of love in a
vignette of Henry IV seeking absolution in Canossa for what was essentially a
political struggle with Pope Gregory VII in five-line stanzas with partial
rhymes ABBAA. In an example of Merrill’s
meticulous attention, the penultimate line “Whatever I tasted, wherever I
strayed” stands out with eleven syllables slowing and spreading the
implications of the magical moment at which everything the poet encounters
becomes “at once of pure pearl made.” He here resumes the pearl imagery which had been
running underground since section one and which is also informed by earlier
texts from the parable of the “pearl of great price” in Matthew through
the fourteenth century Pearl and beyond.
Taking readers by surprise with a sort of verbal shell game, just when
Merrill seemed to have wandered from his theme, he lands suddenly in what looks
like its ecstatic culmination.
In section six, the final lyric of the
variations, iambic pentameter dominates, though the syllable count ranges from
ten to thirteen and even partial rhymes are so dispersed as to vanish. Yet this conclusion is a ringing call, as the
poet affirms the quest for love, however imperfect, reaching a total acceptance
of the flip side of the erotic coin in what he calls the “sweet air” of the
final words, which then reader realizes had been implicit from the start, but
which has been justified by the series of lyrics.
What is most important about the form of
both “The Black Swan” and “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle
Guards” is not the specific forms the poet employs or the alterations that
enrich the poems meanings, but rather the fact that any reader or listener will
perceive structures in the sound.
Whether consciously or not, the poem’s consumers react to the
patterning. Merrill might be compared to
the masters of bebop whose wild polyrhythms and changes on melody could only be
heard if traces of enough regularity to create expectations persisted. Careful analysis of Chaucer or Shakespeare
reveals considerable variation even in these canonical poets, but Merrill’s
choice of rough cut rhymes and cadences that stumble or skip as often as they
march distinguishes his work.
If the poet is showing off, it would be a
shame were the reader not to enjoy the display.
Merrill’s pyrotechnics may not be to the taste of all, but they are
masterfully constructed in a way impressive to anyone sensitive the sound value
of words. It is as theoretically absurd
to suggest that too great a skill in managing the sound of a poem can entail a
lack of strong feeling as to suggest that excessive brilliance in imagery or in
narrative might imply some other faults.
In fact there is no reason to regard artistic technique and passion as
in some way opposed when in fact the former is so often in service to the
latter.
Critics are simply wrong when they suggest
that technical virtuosity is anything but a strength. The error arises due to the fact that many
readers, both lay and professional, retain Romantic assumptions. The recreational manipulation of symbols
called literature may cultivate the illusion of passionate self-expression. Yet the author also may strive for a variety
of effects. A writer may, for instance,
construct a description of a place or a personality. Another may be more tendentious, stressing
theme over other elements. Story-telling
may dominate some novels or poems. The
creation of beauty is a universal artistic goal; little wonder that in some
works this foundational element is foregrounded.
Most works include an array of these
aesthetic ends, though they are not mixed in equal portions. None is inherently superior to another. A description, a didactic theme, a good
story, a verbal object of startling beauty, each must be judged to fail or
succeed on its own terms. The
Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the fictions of Ronald Firbank are
certainly not to everyone’s taste, but they have consistently found admiring
readers. Should Merrill’s fate be
similar, he will be in good company.
1.
Anthony Harrigan, “Mannered World,” New York
Times, July 8, 1951; William Meredith, “Images and Reality,“ May 3, 1959;
X. J. Kennedy, “Four Fashions of Contemporary Verse,” New York Times,
November 25, 1962; Gene Baro, “New In Poetry,” New York Times, June 26,
1966; Daniel Hoffman, “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” New York
Times, August 2, 1970; August Kleinzahler, “Changing Light,” New York
Times, November 7, 2008.
2.
The New Yorker, March 4, 2001.
3.
David Mason, “Merrill’s Intimations,” The Hudson Review Summer
2015.
4.
Rachel Hadas, “James Merrill's Early Work: A Revaluation,” The Kenyon
Review New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), available at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4337717.
5.
Merrill, James, From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (1982).
6.
Both phrases are quoted in Bill Pahlka, “James Merrill's Secret
Scansions,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 59, No. 4
(winter 2017).
