James Merrill: Life and Art
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Langdon Hammer. (2015). James Merrill: Life and Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Langdon Hammer. 2015. James Merrill: Life and Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Langdon Hammer. James Merrill: Life and Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • value: Biography
2. • value: Literary Criticism
3. • value: autobiographies
4. • value: gay history
5. • value: Autobiography
6. • value: 20th Century
7. • value: Gay
8. • value: biographies
9. • value: Music
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11. • value: Lesbian
12. • value: literature
13. • value: Literary
14. • value: Literary gifts
15. • value: lgbt memoir
16. • value: james merrill
17. • value: gay poets
18. • value: lgbt books
19. • value: gay biography
20. • value: biographies of famous people
21. • value: literary biographies
22. • value: books about gay men
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24. • value: gay poetry
25. • value: modern poets

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Hammer, Langdon
   • bioText: LANGDON HAMMER is professor of English and American Studies and chair of the English Department at Yale University. His books include Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and, as editor for the Library of America, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters and May Swenson: Collected Poems. A former Guggenheim fellow and fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he has written about poetry for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, and The American Scholar, where he is poetry editor. His lectures on modern poetry are available free online at Yale Open Courses.
     www.jamesmerrillweb.com
   • name: Langdon Hammer

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2015-04-14T00:00:00Z

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title

James Merrill

fullDescription

Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art.
 
After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored “boys and bars” as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's “chronicles of love & loss” and the poignant personal journey they record.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "A gorgeously written and elegantly comprehensive study of the tumult and passion of Merrill's Life and Art."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Tobias Carroll, Biographile
   • content: "A fascinating, engrossing portrait of a deeply lived life."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Dwight Garner, The New York Times
   • content: "[Hammer] sums up people and milieus with strong, deft strokes. The historian and the critic in him are in elegant synchronicity. He goes to work on Merrill's outsize life like a master fishmonger carving a bluefin tuna. Every cut is measured. Nothing is wasted. The best and fattiest bits – the poetry, in this case – are reserved, like sashimi, for special use."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
   • content: "By a wide margin the largest, most detailed, and most convincingly atmospheric biography ever written about Merrill – it has all the rhetorical and bibliographical flavor of a durable landmark. It's considerably helped along toward that goal by Hammer's lively storytelling style. . . James Merrill: Life and Art is a brilliantly marshaled biography of a surprisingly elusive subject."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2015
     

     Hammer (English & dept. chair, Yale Univ.; editor, Hart Crane: Complete Poems) sheds light on poet James Merrill (1926-95) by deftly mixing literary criticism with biography. The objective seems to look at the line between art and life in Merrill's poetry--not the least of which is seen in the intersection between Merrill's obsession with the Ouija board as literary starter and some of his experimental long poems, "Mirabell: Books of Number" (1978) and "The Changing Light at Sandover" (1982) and the influence of poets Oscar Wilde and Rainer Maria Rilke. Hammer points to Merrill's need to define his own masculinity as a gay man away from definitions partly imposed by his mother and father (who was a partner in the famous Merrill Lynch investment bank). Hammer's analysis of Merrill's work, such as The Seraglio (1957), reveals the poet's use of art to remove himself from restrictive hierarchies (real and imagined) he felt put upon him by his family. Hammer collects examples from and elegantly reveals Merrill's life in his art and vice versa--the book is well organized along these chronological lines throughout. VERDICT While certainly organized for readers who adore biographies and life dramas, this will strongly appeal to those who love to discover where art springs from life. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/14.]--Jesse A. Lambertson, Metamedia Management, LLC, Washington, DC

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 1, 2014
     

     Numerous, mostly academic studies explore the poetry of the late James Merrill, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. But Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale and the poetry editor of the American Scholar, gives Merrill his first big, accessible biography.

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

52

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shortDescription

Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art.
 
After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill...

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