James Merrill's Poetry of Convalescence

Abstract

iM * eans perturb matter and matter, means in James Merrill's poetry-as in The Changing Light at Sandover, where the goofy medium of a Ouija board is elevated by and saps the lofty structures and statements it delivers. More generally, when Merrill presents poststructuralist ideas, he often does so in supposedly obsolete traditional forms which interrogate a too self-regardingly progressive avantgardism; when he employs high modern metaphors, he does so metonymically, so that redemptive transformations in his work (those of psychology, say, or art) seem provisional and endlessly generative rather than authoritative and conclusive.1 The perturbation that results from mutually uplifting and corrosive combinations in Merrill's poems is an important source of their meaning; its dissonance produces competing interpretations. For example, Willard Spiegelman attends to postmodern aspects of Sandover-truth is metaphorical, unity plural, authorship collaborative, the self dissolved-then concludes his discussion on humanistic notes: the poem converts lament to affirmation; nothing is lost; the dead return. Walter Kalaidjian compiles similar evidence, but he concludes that Merrill's ludic textuality is designed to baffle and disperse the windy platitudes of the Western humanist tradition (98).2