Browse Items (151 total)

Selections from For James Merrill: A Birthday Tribute, a 60th birthday present from J. D. McClatchy with tributes from friends, including Anthony Hecht, Robin Magowan, John Hollander, Mary McCarthy, Tony Parigory and Bernard de Zogheb. Scans feature…

Cover of David Jackson: Scenes from His Life - a "lavish chapbook" James Merrill produced for Jackson's 70th birthday, containing fourteen of David's sketches and paintings from the 1950s to 70s - each image paired with a related passage from…

Fifteen pages (out of sixty total) ofa corrected typescript draft ofAn Evening at Sandover, Merrill's first stage adaptation of the Ouija board epic, performed as part of the revived Poets' Theatre at Hasty Pudding theater at Harvard. Peter Hooten…

Promotional poster for James Merrill's memoir A Different Person. Merrill continued revising the memoir into the galleys stage and sent to friends chapters that included them, making changes accordingly.

"Voices from the Other World," published in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, was James Merrill's first--and for many years, only--treatment of the Ouija board séances in a poem. Merrill's supernatural and domestic life with Jackson…

"Violent Pastoral," here in a broadside printed by Laurence Scott, is a poem "set in a Greece of the mind." It's unclear whether Strato Mouflouzelis is the eagle and James Merrill the lamb, or vice versa.

See also photograph of Strato…

"Under Libra: Weights and Measures," published in Braving the Elements, was dedicated to David McIntosh. Included here are two corrected typescript drafts of the poem. Through this seemingly impersonal poem Merrill realized, with the help of his…

"Tony: Ending the Life," published in A Scattering of Salts, is an "expansive elegy for his friend" (Tony Parigory, who died in summer 1993 of AIDS), "and (it is all but explicit) himself." Merrill had been largely silent about his AIDS diagnosis but…

"The Will," published in Divine Comedies, contains the first mention of Ephraim in a poem, as well as the first time he speaks. In it, Ephraim explains why the novel draft was lost twice--implying that he was involved.

Notebook pages showing the first title of and early notes toward the pivotal, experimental, multifaceted poem "The Thousand and Second Night," which was based partly upon Merrill's Bell's palsy experience. These notes capture Merrill's uncertainty…