Browse Items (151 total)

Stephen Yenser, Merrill's student, friend, correspondent, literary executor, and "ideal reader."

Tony Parigory and James Merrill. "Tall, smiling, Alexandrian Tony...In his worldly wisdom, off-color jokes, and macaronic bons mots...he resembled none of Merrill's friends so much as Ephraim, the Familiar Spirit."

David McIntosh, a disciplined, reserved painter of abstract landscapes who drew a "'firm and gentle line' between love and friendship, and what he wanted was the latter."

Judith Moffett, who "...brought a strong moral idealism, sensitivity to the perspective of gay men, and an appetite for literature."

Strato Mouflouzelis, "...the bittersweet muse of [James Merrill's] middle years..."

See also "Days of 1964" manuscripts, November 17, 1964 letter to Daryl Hine and "Violent Pastoral" broadside.

Maria Mitsotaki and James Merrill. Merrill's face is bound as a result of Bell's Palsy, an episode recounted in "The Thousand and Second Night" (see also the manuscript pages for that poem).

"[Maria] was pert, pretty, small and sweet...and able…

Leila "Zelly" Howard, James Merrill's beloved governess, with whom he remained close until her death in 1977.

James Merrill and Kimon Friar, Merrill's Amherst teacher and lover. "Short, wiry, and dark, he was a high-minded, charismatic man of letters and an unabashed self-promoter."

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…

In this popular poem, Merrill reminisces about the summer of 1937, waiting for and then working on a jigsaw puzzle with his governess, Zelly, and her teaching him "her languages." "Lost in Translation" is often cited as Merrill's greatest short poem.…