A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Download

Author: Robert Polito
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472065240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time

Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 9780689112836
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board

Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520244
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.

Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 110187550X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.

Author: Jeannie Whayne
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080713855X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father’s death in 1870, Robert E. “Lee” Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned. A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation—Whayne suggests—not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II. Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post–World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson’s story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.

Author: Langdon Hammer
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375413332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Book Description
"A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--

Author: Rose Arny
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 2896

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Book Description

Author: Alfred Bendixen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107003361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1326

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

Author: James Merrill
Publisher: New York : Atheneum, 1978, 1979 printing.
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Mirabell: Books of Number is a volume of poetry; the second of three books which together form the epic 560-page poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, which was published as a whole in 1982.

Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Carcanet Press
ISBN: 9781847771605
Category : Painting, American
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Benton presents an introduction and an anthology of Bishop's formal and informal prose on the subject of art and artists, as well as full-colour reproductions of 40 of her pictures, dating from 1937 to 1978.