Rethinking Models of Literary Change: The Case of James Merrill

Abstract

No one has accused James Merrill of being postmodern. If anything, his accomplished formalism and his reliance on traditional forms and conventions have made his poetry seem slightly anachronistic. If we are not to dismiss Merrill as a reactionary but to try to define his place in American poetry, we need to rethink models of literary history and change with which we have read American poetry since World War II, for his work challenges ways we have configured aftermath of modernism. In poetry, slippery term postmodern is used to refer primarily to poets working in various experimental traditions, in free or even prose. For example, Donald Allen's retitling his influential 1960 anthology, The American Poetry, as The Postmoderns in 1982 claims this designation for poets whose preference for formal freedom or openness as opposed to academic, formalistic, strictly rhymed and metered verse places them among most truly authentic, indigenous American writers (9). Similarly, while declining to use term postmoder, James E. B. Breslin envisions history of poetry after modernism as an opposition between formalist verse, which represents orthodoxy of a rigidified modernism, and an antiformalist revolt, with which American poetry in 1960s once again became moder, 'of present' (xiv, xv). For him, Merrill is part of New Rear Guard, one of New Formalists (xiv, 25) who are countered by open-form poets out to capture temporal immediacy (xv) and revive early spirit of modernism. Marjorie Perloff, who follows open forms to 1980s, uses to designate LANGUAGE poets, in whose postlyric work the Romantic and Modernist cult of personality has given way to what new poets call 'the dispersal of speaking subject,' denial of unitary, authoritative ego (x); for her, the pivotal figure in transformation of Romantic (and Modernistic) lyric into what we now think of as postmoder poetry is surely Ezra Pound