"James Merrill’s Translation of Proust" by Erica Kao

From Eric Kao's Senior Essay for Prof. Langdon Hammer's English 410, Yale University (2012).

© Erica Kao

“A Declaration of Love”: James Merrill’s Translation of Proust

I. Introduction

Marcel Proust’s example of an autobiographical fiction in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu resonated as a modus operandi for James Merrill. Proust embodied the life of the aesthete and acted as an ideal for Merrill to aspire to as a homosexual writer. Proust showed that “there was nothing too commonplace or too trivial which once seen as a phenomenon either of light or of social behavior couldn’t be dwelt on in perfect seriousness” (Collected Prose, 92), exemplifying how the writer can use manners or “social behavior” to dwell patiently and seriously with his reader in the desire to be fully understood. This aesthetic and ethical claim in the creation and refinement of art captivated Merrill: “The real triumph of manners in Proust is the extreme courtesy toward the reader, the voice explaining at once formally and intimately” (Collected Prose, 59). Merrill finds in Proust an intimate, personal, and reasonable voice that he seeks to capture and achieve in his poetry.

Merrill also shared with Proust a temperament for control through form and metaphor. Merrill was fascinated by Proust’s use of metaphor early on, even writing about it in his senior thesis at Amherst. The concept of metaphor is especially fruitful for Merrill for two reasons: 1) metaphor is a way to talk about writing, and 2) metaphor is rooted in translation. First, writing is made up of and produces metaphors; therefore, metaphor offers one way to understand Merrill’s attention to his own creative process in his poems. Metaphor, fundamentally, concerns itself with the invisible workings of the mind and captures the contemplative life of the mind. Howard Nemerov follows the implications of the word “metaphor” beyond its association with the verb “bear,” to show that the ancient and traditional idea concerning the production of thoughts, their coming into existence out of nowhere, lies hidden in the notion of “carrying across” or “transferring” (629). Metaphor thus reveals Merrill’s creative process centered on revision which he incorporates into the form and theme of his poetry.

Secondly, writing is a personal act of translation. Proust remarked on the role of the writer as that of a translator in Time Regained: “So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not have to be ‘invented’ by a great writer—for it exists already in each one of us—has to be translated by him. The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator” (Time Regained, 291). For Merrill and Proust then, metaphor and translation function as emblems for writing. Metaphor and translation resonate with each other and are hard to separate, shown by the deeply intertwined roots of the words themselves; after all, the word “metaphor” and the word “translation” come from the same ancient Greek stems (OED). In the poems “For Proust” and “Lost in Translation,” Merrill explores two concepts of translation as a creative repetition or a circle, like memory, and as dispersive linear fragments, respectively. Memory links to metaphor and translation in that writing is an act of memory, creating a space to relive and experience it. Merrill’s poetics of revision and the concept of translation complement each other as refining processes, where memories are translated into poetic imagination.

In his poem “For Proust,” Merrill draws explicitly on Proust and titles his work as a dedication to the writer. He lifts the plot of the poem from Proust’s Time Regained, alluding to the famous revelatory scene just before the Guermantes’s reception. In the poem, Proust leaves his room in search for “a little phrase,” meeting an old friend before returning to his room. The poem is autobiographical in the metaphorical sense because the “you” of the poem, presumably Marcel of In Search of Lost Time, could be understood as a figure for Merrill or even the writer in general. The premise of the poem is an act of translation: Merrill translates this episode from Proust into his poem; the writer seeks out and tries to recall a little phrase hummed from memory. A similar premise begins Merrill’s later poem, “Lost in Translation,” where the poet seeks not “a little phrase” but a Rilke translation of a Valéry poem. This poem is a more self-conscious attempt at translating life into art and turns explicitly autobiographical. In the poem, Merrill muses on the childhood experience of putting a puzzle together, which he juxtaposes with the search in the present for Rilke’s translation of Valéry’s “Palme.”

The two poems reflect on Merrill’s own act of translating Proust. Between the two poems, Merrill revises his own definition of translation. “For Proust” is based on a repetition that turns in circular fashion, exemplified by Northrop Frye’s cyclical form. In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye explains the quest romance in Marcel Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time, focusing on the principle of movement through time as a metaphor for human creativity:

More frequently, the quest romance takes on a spiral form, an open circle where the end is the beginning transformed and renewed by the heroic quest…the same principle of reversed movement can be associated with human creativity. Such a reversal occurs at the end of Proust, where an experience of repetition transforms Marcel’s memory of his life into a potential imaginative vision, so that the narrator comes to the beginning of his book at the point where the reader comes to the end of it. Time being irreversible, a return to a starting point, even in a theory of recurrence as naïve as Nietzsche’s, can only be a symbol for something else. The past is not returned to; it is recreated, and when time in Proust is found again (retrouvé), the return to the beginning is a metaphor for creative repetition (175).

This imaginative loop of writing to experience, back to writing, applies to Merrill as he uses Proust to investigate his own creative process. In fact, one way of viewing translation is as a creative repetition, and it is this view that Merrill sets forth in “For Proust.” In “Lost in Translation,” however, translation is more complex and dispersive, involving a broken and fractured form with the inclusion of multiple languages, perspectives, and narratives. Translation, revealed to be more lateral and expansive rather than circular and contained, takes us away from the point of origin and reveals it to be unstable in the first place. If “For Proust” is about the creative process, summed up in the line “What happened is becoming literature,” then “Lost in Translation” attempts to incorporate that process into the work itself, focusing less on representation and more on the creative act.

Starting with Merrill’s senior thesis as a point of departure, I will define metaphor in terms that will help us investigate Merrill’s own creative process. I will next look at drafts of “For Proust” and “Lost in Translation,” to shed additional light on Merrill’s writing process and to illuminate the ways in which Proust helps Merrill negotiate between form and experience in his poetry. The drafts indicate which aspects of each poem gave Merrill the most difficulty, and I will compare the successive changes made in the drafts to the final version of each poem in order to examine Merrill’s two conflicting ideas of translation. Finally, I will return to Merrill’s senior thesis to use metaphor as a way to deal with the tension between the two theories of translation and between brokenness and wholeness.

II. Proustian Metaphor and Translation

Merrill concentrates on formal structure when he meditates on the relationship between writing and memory in his thesis written at Amherst, “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: Impressionism in Literature.” He compares how writing enables one to capture a moment in time similar to how the Impressionists capture a snapshot of nature in a painting. His thesis is a search for lost experience, an experiment in regaining time or recapturing experience such as the experience of reading Proust. Proust’s metaphors, notable for their extent and depth, are like memories themselves. Merrill investigates Proust’s use of metaphor in capturing memory and concludes that there are two main elements of Proustian metaphor: “these two elements, both existing separately in time (in Proust’s mind), are spatially combined (in Proust’s sentence) in order to achieve that release from time which is the ultimate effect of all his revelations” (“Impressionism in Literature,” 39). In other words, time and space are two separate elements of memory, and the act of writing creates a space to free memory from time. Merrill goes on to expand upon the concept of physical space that metaphor creates:

For the emphasis is entirely upon the metaphor, which is our most valuable key to understanding the experience described, and for the most part that experience is the metaphor. Proust’s technique of structure and syntax permit us to witness the entire evolution of the metaphor, its origin, its development, and its fulfillment—the total passage including all references, all images, the completed relation (92).

The two key points in this passage are the permeability between the metaphor and the experience described, and the evolution of the metaphor through structure and syntax. First, permeability allows the metaphor and the experience described by the metaphor to blend, each one deepening the other. Secondly, the evolution of the metaphor relates to how metaphor unfolds a relation which syntax then carries forward and completes, creating a temporal space for its existence.

Though Merrill’s syntax is important, working in relation to verse form, for example, other formal qualities serve the purpose of Proust’s syntax. The spatial manifestation of metaphor in “For Proust” exists in formal patterns like the abba rhymed quatrains. Tracking how Merrill had arrived at this format for his poem suggests that the format and perspective come hand in hand. We see Merrill getting closer and becoming more intimate with his subject. Merrill wrote many drafts of the poem, which he archived carefully. In his drafts, Merrill begins the poem by calling his own writing process into question. He starts with the touching phrase “A declaration of love,” a thought that could be logically completed by several prepositional phrases (by Proust, by Merrill, for Proust) suggesting intimacy with the subject. Notably, Merrill does not arrive at the second person voice until later. He first plays with the third person point of view: “He writes and watches, counting over / The stresses of a dozen other lines,” followed by the alternative “He numbers the minute / stresses of a dozen earlier lines” as if Proust were writing verse. Merrill identifies with Proust by imagining him as a poet who writes “lines” of verse instead of sentences.

Next, Merrill tests the effects of a first person narration: “what neither suffers, grows or dies / I hold in my hand.” In the margins of this experimental sequence of lines, none of which made it to the poem in its final form, Merrill doodled boxes and prisms and a strangely geometric, shape-based face, as if prefiguring the arrival of the poem’s geometric final form of rhymed stanzas. Only when Merrill settles down with the second person narration of “you,” does he also arrive at the quatrain format. In the choice of format, he becomes more intimate and personal with Proust, addressing the writer as “you” as if he knew him personally. “A declaration of love” thus resonates with Merrill attaching Proust to his life by imagining the writer as a lover, friend, parent, or alter ego.

Besides clarifying the poet’s own relationship to the subject, the formal structure also highlights the poem’s concern with the craft of writing. The formal structure of quatrains enhances the effect of Frye’s creative revolution and return, reflecting how the central “you,” the figure of the writer, makes sense of experience through the power of language and words. Not only does the abba rhyme scheme affect a circular loop of renewal in sound, but the type of rhyme itself, rime riche, also emphasizes the power of words to signify different meanings. In the margins of both typewritten and handwritten manuscripts, Merrill doodled profiles of faces, played with rhyme words, and played with different wordings of phrases. In playing with rhyme words for the paired rhyme in the middle of each quatrain, Merrill settled on ordinary words to center each stanza around: things, stir, palms, low, phrase, later, along/a long, leaves, past, pale, draw/withdraw. The words chosen are plain, but versatile and can be used as nouns and verbs. The multiplicity of possibilities relates to how different meanings exist simultaneously in the use of language and in the act of translation. Language and translation, imagined as organic, maturing processes, incorporate the work of revision in the poem as its principle and system of creation. In creating a poem so heavily invested in revision in its drafts but also in the ideas he continually refines, Merrill thematizes and remakes the experience of creative repetition that Proust embodies.

III. Translation – I: The Circle in “For Proust”

So far, I have drawn from Merrill’s senior thesis on Proust for a discourse on metaphor as a spatial and temporal structure for experience. I will now take this idea of translating figurative language into a physical realm and apply it to “For Proust.” Merrill structures “For Proust” around three physical movements: the movement from a public to a private setting, from youth to age, and lastly, from downstairs to upstairs, all as part of the larger motion into the world and back again. These movements relate to translation, fundamentally also a type of movement in its definition of transportation or conveyance from a certain person, place, or condition to another (OED). The first movement from a public to private place constitutes the artistic retreat into solitude. The writer moves from “packed public rooms” to “one dim room without contour.” The dim room without contour reminds us of a tomb, but it also reminds us of a brain or Merrill’s inner room or study, signaling a retreat inward and upward toward the higher realm of intellect and aesthetics. Proust similarly advocates this inner retreat and calls for solitude as necessary for artistic creation.

The second movement from youth to age, unlike the other two movements, occurs through the figure of the woman instead of the writer. Throughout the poem, the female figure passes through three stages: the conjured young friend (“a child still/ at first glance”), a middle-aged woman (“in her hair a long / White lock has made its truce with appetite”), then an aged woman (“An old, old woman shuffling in to draw / Curtains”). Although the old woman is a new character, she can also be read as representing an aged version of the conjured friend. The word “old” is repeated, emphasizing the fact of her age and indicating the possibility of reading her as an allegory. If the “old, old woman” is read allegorically, the three female figures then represent a conflation of time, which is another theme of this poem. There are many instances of time and experience distilled: she speaks of the past, “how did we get along / At all, those years,” and of the future, “speak[ing] the truth two decades later.” Not only are time and the process of aging compacted, but Proust’s entire work itself is also condensed in Merrill’s female figure. The prominent female figures of Proust’s work, Gilberte (in the young and middle aged friend) and Albertine (in the young friend) and Françoise (in the old woman at the end), are meshed into one.

The passage of time is most palpable in the middle-aged figure. In his drafts, Merrill spends a lot of time working on this figure and gives her four stanzas, emphasizing her importance in condensing the experiences of a life lived and a love spent. The stanzas in which she appears also concentrate the images running throughout the poem, providing a literal condensation of images as well as a metaphorical condensation of Proust’s work and the passage of time. Her last stanza, the most prominent compacting of the plot of the poem, acts as a metaphor for the writing of the poem itself:

And presently she rises. Though in pain

You let her leave—the loved one always leaves.

What of the little phrase? It’s notes, like leaves

In the strong tea you have contrived to drain

Strangely intensify what you must do.

As a metaphor for the writing of the poem, the stanza runs through images conjured previously: from the second stanza, drinking tea as “a thin spoon bitter stimulants will stir”; from the fourth stanza, the friend conjured; from the fifth stanza, listening for the Vinteuil sonata: “There had been a little phrase / She hummed you could not sleep tonight without / Hearing again.” In his drafts, picking up on his own compositional process, Merrill came to a halt in writing this stanza. He draws more attention to form as the handwritten text of this stanza is broken up with phrases he played with and turned over briefly before discarding. The discarded phrases all circle around ideas of pattern and form. The phrases “subside from a pattern you must heed” followed by “form,” “sinks to a pattern,” and “from pattern” follow each other down the page in succession. The ending does indeed subside into a pattern as Merrill works his way into the Vinteuil sonata, “Subsiding into a pattern which you loved // Hearing again.” The musical motif out of Proust features a resonant and rich sound image. Proust also uses Vintueil as a crystallization point, the leitmotif that distills the relationship between Swann and Odette, Marcel and Albertine, and relived memory in general, into an incomplete melodic sequence. Proust himself uses the term “the little phrase,” and Merrill keeps it as “a phrase” instead of a complete melody to connect to and establish a relationship with his own writing process. Besides indicating a musical term, “phrase” refers to the act of writing and expression in language. It comes from the Latin phrasis, which means diction, style, or expression (OED). Once again, Merrill turns reflexive in this move toward meta-discourse about his own creative process. The phrase is partial and incomplete; it is the component of an utterance. In the context of “Lost in Translation,” this phrase prefigures Merrill’s interest in fragments and puzzle pieces as evocative parts that gesture toward a whole that they themselves do not embody.

The female figure thus represents a horizontal momentum that is condensed. Time and aging, and even experiences in Proust’s novel, all are horizontal. They march forward and what is left behind is lost. This force condensing time, images carried throughout the poem, and Proust’s work exerts a pressure that transforms the horizontal into the vertical, the third and final physical movement in the poem. Merrill prefigures the transition to verticality with the phrase “presently she rises,” and notably, the condensation point occurs as the female figure leaves, about to be lost in the process of horizontal movement. The pain of leaving and of the loss of a loved one, when captured and translated into a work of art, is made bearable. Hence, the writer makes the first vertical motion “up the strait stair” because it serves to “strangely intensify what you must do,” that is, return to the writer’s nest to continue his task in the highest realm of aesthetic experience, in poetry.

Besides the figure of the woman and the Vintueil sonata, which seem to constitute the more extensive revisions in Merrill’s drafts, the last line of the poem, “The world will have put on a thin gold mask,” went through many revisions as well. Tracking the progression of this phrase shows how heavily form plays a role in his compositional process. First, Merrill makes the writing task a completed thing of the past and uses “chaos” in place of “the world,” resulting in the lines: “The salt of the completed task / Fits chaos with a paper thin gold mask,” or, alternatively, this version: “The visage of chaos with a thin gold mask.” The idea that “the completed task” orders “chaos” suggests that writing and translating are processes of order. According to the OED, “syntax” means order and even has the now obsolete meanings of connection, congruity, and agreement. Merrill plays this sense of order and harmony against “chaos,” a word which shows up in his drafts but fails to make it to the final version.

Next, Merrill rejects this sense of completion as something too definite; instead, he references the distinction between interior and exterior spaces with “Outside, all chaos dons a thin gold mask.” In place of “all chaos,” Merrill tries substituting “the city” and “your house” before getting to “the world.” Once he arrives at the “the world” as the subject—a more fitting term because it is more familiar and ordinary than “chaos” but still implies something larger and external to the individual—he plays with the verb tenses. Merrill lists as choices the phrases “will don a thin gold mask” and “puts on a thin gold mask.” He then cuts out the frame of “outside” and merges the two verb options to arrive at “The world will have put on a frail gold mask.” “Frail only gets changed back to “thin” at the very last minute, creating a sense of strength out of sickness. The substitution of “thin” for “frail” relates to the idea that the writer is sickly and “beyond cough or pale of gardenia.” This substitution resonates more with the power of turning life into art because even infirmity and sickness, understood as a dark undercurrent of the narrative (“She understands you have been ill,” “beyond the pale / Of cough or of gardenia,” and “Feverish in time”), is transformed into strength of a new kind. Merrill makes a statement for the power of art that surpasses life.

The form of the last quatrain further affirms the power of art to pass beyond the limitations and boundaries of life. The final line, “The world will have put on a thin gold mask,” completes an embedded acrostic:

Feverish in time, if you suspend the task,

An old, old woman shuffling in to draw

Curtains, will read a line or two, withdraw.

The world will have put on a thin gold mask (emphasis mine).

The word “FACT” is from the Old French “feat,” meaning an action or deed, or to affect one’s full purpose, and from the Latin past participle of facere, to do (OED). With this embedded word, the actualization of the literary ideal exists, encoded in the very structure of the poem. The acrostic in the last stanza is the embodiment of “What happened is becoming literature” and follows just after that line, which can be read as the archetype for the entire poem summed up as literary actualization. The FACT acrostic thus provides a blend between the poem itself and its formal elements. The last stanza acts as the culminating point of order, metaphor, poem, and meaning, which Merrill admires in Proustian metaphor in his senior thesis, where “an order arises that is the metaphor, the poem, and the meaning of the poem” (“Impressionism,” 91). In the acrostic, then, Merrill refers to Proust’s autobiographical life mission as articulated by Marcel in the Guermantes’s library:

And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant (Time Regained, 304).

Proust develops faith in the gestation of art, as does Merrill with his acrostic and throughout the poem.

The transformation of life into art develops as an organic, perhaps even a subconscious, process in the writer where life shows itself as material for art. The affirmation of this inner translation and organic growth, as Proust describes it, seems to contrast with the last line about “the thin gold mask” in Merrill’s poem because of its eerie reference to mortality. The image can be more fully explained through cross-referencing with Proust. The poem ends on the strange note of the thin gold mask, a reference to the ancient art object of Agamemnon’s funeral mask at Mycenae (Yenser, 81). This uncanny death imagery echoes with the previous lines evoking a tomb, “One dim room without contour,” calling forth a heightened sense of the passage of time and bringing immediacy to the writer working “feverish in time” and against time. The allusion to a death mask with its reference to mortality and limitation (death ending writing) coincides with the acrostic that affirms the actualization of a literary ambition. The tension between these two opposing ideas relates to the ending of Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time when the young Marcel first begins to despair of ever writing his great work. After a summer at Balbec and his first experiences of romantic love, he ends with the death mask metaphor of the morning sun:

And for months on end…the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and factitious enamel. And when Francoise removed the pins from the top of the window-frame, took down the cloths, and drew back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorial, as a sumptuous millenary mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it, embalmed in its vesture of gold (Within a Budding Grove, 730).

Proust ends with the similar morbid evocation of a gold funeral mask, in this case the gold mask of an Egyptian mummy. The choice of “lifeless,” “dead,” “immemorial,” “mummy,” and “embalmed” suggest morbidity, but also stasis. It seems an unexpected deviation from the previous meditation on the magical and changing nature of the sea and of the young girls Marcel flirts with at Balbec. The comparison is not meant to be depressing so much as ordinary, routine, a habit both comforting and narcotic. Proust recalls the sun waking him in Balbec. The narcotic nature of habit is comforting and is mirrored in Nature’s habit, where the sun comes up every day, linking us back to the end of “For Proust,” when the old, old woman draws the curtains against dawn. The old woman, then, becomes an allegory for Mother Nature and her eternal cycles of day and night, life and death. Most importantly, in the Balbec passage from Proust, the sunlight streaming in through the window gives the wall the color of “lifeless and factitious enamel,” or in the original French, “un émail inerte et factice.” “Factitious” means made by or resulting from art (OED), and the word is especially suggestive as we hear again the word embedded in the last stanza of the poem. The last line, “The world will have put on a thin gold mask” therefore relates to artistic achievement and actualization, as considered in the context of the allusion to Proust’s Balbec. Merrill even imagines the world as a poet who puts on an aesthetic mask, just as we have seen how he imagines Proust himself as a poet in earlier incarnations of the poem.

Thus far, Merrill moves us through the poem through three spatial metaphors. The three movements generate micronarratives: the writer’s solitude and retreat, his experience of time and writing through his female friend, and now his return to the writer’s nest as well. The final equation that gives us the return to the beginning, the final piece in Frye’s “metaphor for creative repetition,” is the movement from downstairs to upstairs, from a lower level to a higher level of a building. After the crystallization point, condensing the horizontal processes of aging, time, and poetic images relating to writing and reading, Merrill emphasizes a vertical movement. The movement from downstairs to upstairs (“Back where you came from, up the strait stair, past / All understanding”) takes place in the stanza immediately following the crystallization point and relates to what Gaston Bachelard sets forth in his Poetics of Space, where to go upstairs is to withdraw: the attic is the “rational zone of intellectual projects” (18). Merrill activates Bachelard’s psychological understanding of creative development by introducing this vertical movement. If experience occurs horizontally, the translation to literature takes place vertically. Crystallization and condensation in the female figure and musical phrase gesture toward fixity of this vertical mode, the transcendence of life into art. Thus, the movement of translation can be seen as horizontal consciousness transformed and recast as a vertical one. The interplay of the vertical and the horizontal comes from Proust, who lends the basis for the architecture housing Merrill’s poetic consciousness.

Primary sources:

Merrill, James. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: Impressionism in Literature. Senior Essay. Amherst College, 1947.
--. Collected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
--. Collected Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
--. “For Proust.” N.d. MS and TS. Special Collections Olin Library, Washington University in St. Louis,
--. Letter to Langdon Hammer. 20 October 1979. TS.
--. “Lost in Translation.” 1972-1973. MS and TS. Special Collections, Olin Library, Washington U. St. Louis.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and
D. J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

Secondary Sources:

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans: Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Coffman, Christopher. "'Swann's Way. Basic Training': Interpretation in James Merrill's
Late Collections and A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu." Comparative Literature. 61.4 (2009): 400-415.
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of the Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978.
Hammer, Langdon. “James Merrill’s Water Street (1957-1962).”Parnassus:PoetryinReview. 32 (2011): 336-386.
Lehman, David. "Elemental Bravery: The Unity of James Merrill's Poetry. Ed. Lehman,David, Berger, Charles ed. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 23- 60.
McClatchy, J. D. "James Merrill's Inner Room." Raritan. 19.1 (1999): 1-22.
McClatchy, J. D. "On Water Street." Ed. Lehman, David and Berger, Charles. James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. 61-96.
Moffett, Judith. James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” Ed. Bowers, Fredson,Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. 207-249.
Nemerov, Howard. “On Metaphor.” Virginia Quarterly Review. 45.4 (1969): 621-636.
Yenser, Stephen. The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.