Against Apocalypse: Politics and James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover"

Abstract

Admittedly, James Merrill is not a poet in the manner of, say, Denise Levertov. Although Levertov wants to attain such osmosis the personal and the public . .. that no one would be able to divide our poems into categories, she nevertheless bases her answer to the question What Is Political Poetry? largely on political or social content (128), and, like many contemporary poets, she has been an activist. One recent study her poetry distinguishes her clear moral and ideological position from much modern poetry which remains hermetic and socially disengaged (Smith 232), a description Robert von Hallberg might find suitable for Merrill's work: Politics, with few exceptions, is a subject Merrill deliberately disdains. . . . From [Merrill's] camp viewpoint politics is stylelessly overladen with content; it can be ignored because the camp sensibility is premised, as Susan Sontag has noted, on detachment (110-11). Von Hallberg offers up passages where Merrill no sooner broaches a issue than he retreats (Merrill refers in Book Ephraim, section J, to nuclear research / Our instinct first is to deplore, and second / To think no more of [33]) and quotes The Broken Home: rarely buy a newspaper, or vote. / To do so, I have learned, is to invite / tread a stone guest within my house (142).1 Indeed, Merrill has plainly conceded, We all have our limits. I draw the line at politics or hippies (Recitative 32). (Spoken in 1967, these must have sounded like fighting words.)