<i>James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics</i> (review)

Piotr Gwiazda

doi:10.1353/mod.2012.0029

James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics (review)

Modernism/modernity ◽

10.1353/mod.2012.0029 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 396-398

Author(s):

Piotr Gwiazda

Keyword(s):

James Merrill

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James Merrill and W.H. Auden

10.1057/9780230607163 ◽

2007 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Piotr K. Gwiazda

Keyword(s):

James Merrill

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Spectral Conversions: James Merrill and Hannah Weiner

Intuitions in Literature, Technology, and Politics ◽

10.1057/9781137006974_5 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 81-116

Author(s):

Alan Ramón Clinton

Keyword(s):

James Merrill

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Innocents Abroad? Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill Overseas

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421331.003.0021 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 294-306

Author(s):

Ben Leubner

Keyword(s):

Strong Sense ◽

Elizabeth Bishop ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

James Merrill ◽

State Of Affairs ◽

As If

This chapter investigates the ways in which both Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill acknowledged their complicity in cultural erosions that they wished to see forestalled in Brazil and Greece, respectively. As Robert von Hallberg has noted, what often renders the genre of the ‘protest poem’ so two-dimensional is the lack of any sense of complicity in what is being protested, as if the poet was unwilling or unable to see his/her own role in the events and processes that the poem decries. Neither Bishop nor Merrill suffered from this kind of shortcoming of vision. At the heart of many of their poems which lament a given state of affairs is a strong sense that they are in part responsible for that state of affairs, and this makes these poems not weaker, as a result of an embedded hypocrisy, but stronger, as a result of an unwillingness to succumb to the delusion that oneself could possibly be free of blame.

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