The Changing Light at Sandover PDF Download

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:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description

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: 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: Alison Lurie
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142000450
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.

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: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9780679765905
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Presents a collection of poetry in which the author transforms autobiographical insights and experiences into profound meditations on life and the world around him.

Author: Timothy Materer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801437601
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"Materer interprets Merrill's body of work from the perspective of his epic The Changing Light at Sandover and shows that in his earliest poems and in the volumes preceding The Changing Light, Merrill repeatedly expressed his fear of nuclear holocaust and his sense that some momentous revelation was near at hand. Materer demonstrates how apocalyptic motifs also inspire Late Settings, The Inner Room, and A Scattering of Salts."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: P. Gwiazda
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230607160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
James Merrill and W.H. Auden offers a substantial analysis of the literary and personal relationship between two major twentieth-century poets. As Gwiazda argues, Auden's prominence in the post-World War II American poetry scene as a homosexual poet and critic makes his impact on Merrill particularly noteworthy. Merrill's imaginary recreation of Auden in his occult verse trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) offers a powerful statement about the dynamics of poetic influence between gay male poets. Combining archival research, textual analysis, and aspects of queer theory, James Merrill and W.H. Auden examines Sandover's implications to the contentious issues of homosexual identity and self-representation.