James Merrill: Recitative

James Merrill, Recitative, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1986

Merrill: Whereas Eliot gives what may be only an illusion—I haven’t read him for twenty years—of being infinitely in control of his material: so much so, that you have the sense of the whole civilization under glass. As, indeed, Eliot’s poems are under glass for me. The temptation to reread them, though it’s growing, is still fairly slight.
Sheehan: How about Wallace Stevens?
Merrill: Stevens seems much more of a poet, that is to say, a nonhistorian. (An Interview with Donald Sheehan, Conducted May 23, 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin., pg. 26)

Merrill: I’ve enjoyed reading novels more often—or more profoundly—that I’ve enjoyed reading poems. There seems to be no poet except perhaps Dante whose work has the extraordinary richness of Tolstoy or Proust; and there are very few poets whose work gives as much fun as James. Oh, there’s always a give and take. For instance, though a lot of the sound of James is prose, can’t one tell that he’d read Browning? (27)

Sheehan: What is the feeling behind Montale’s poems that struck you especially? [27]
Merrill: The emotional refinement, gloomy and strongly curbed. It’s surprisingly permeable by quite ordinary objects—ladles, hens, pianos, half-read letters. To me he’s the twentieth-century nature poet. Any word can lead you from the kitchen garden into really inhuman depths—if there are any of those left nowadays. The two natures were always one, but it takes an extraordinary poet to make us feel that, feel it in our spines. (27-28)

Sheehan: You mentioned Elizabeth Bishop before…
Merrill: …there is no oracular amplification, she doesn’t go about on stilts to make her vision wider. She doesn’t need that. She’s wise and human enough as it is. And this is rather what I feel about Stevens. For all the philosophy that intrudes in and between the lines, Stevens’ poetry is a body of work that is man-sized. Whereas I wouldn’t say that of Pound; he tries, I think, to write like a god. Stevens and Miss Bishop merely write like angels. (28)

Merrill: Whenever I reach an impasse, working on a poem, I try to imagine an analogy with musical form; it usually helps. (29)

Merrill: All imagery allows for a psychological reading. You can analyze Wordsworth until he sounds like Freud’s first patient, if you like. (An Interview with John Boatwright and Enrique Ucelay DaCal, conducted in 1968, pg. 37)

Brown: Did you ever hear Stevens read? On the recording it’s not quite satisfactory.
Merrill: In Florida once he visited Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who was a friend of my mother. He started reading at someone’s request, but was unendurable, and after twenty minutes Marjorie Rawlings snatched the book from his hand. She was going to shot him how! No, I never heard him read. (An Interview with Ashley Brown, 1968, pg. 42)

[in the early days, of First Poems, Merrill’s reading of] Rilke in the Duino Elegies. The “we” there is an elite of sufferers. I didn’t know German very well then, but Rilke was five times more poetic to me than Yeats. Yeats seemed by comparison somewhat external to one’s situation. …
Brown: I’ve always felt one had to know German rather well to read Rilke—he eludes translation much of the time. But maybe I’m being too strict about this.
Merrill: I don’t know German any better now. In fact the point may be not to know German well enough where Rilke in concerned! So as still to feel, I mean, the overture of abstraction in all those capitalized nouns. (43)

Brown: Since you are now involved in long poems, what do you think are their possibilities and limitations at this stage of American poetry? I assume that epic is out of the question. You seem to like the theme and variations best.
Merrill: Well, everybody has agreed that psychological action is more interesting than epic. One mainly wants a form where one thing leads to another—it needn’t, but it can.
Brown: I keep thinking that The Prelude could still be used as a model of some sort. It was very bold of Wordsworth, don’t you agree, to write a poem of epic length that departed from the inherited tradition of mythology that almost everybody had depended on? It is somewhat ruminative, but it has a real unity. [46]
Merrill: You will have imagined (and come close to the truth) that I fell asleep on the seventh page of The Prelude and woke only the next morning. It’s not me, I’m afraid! (46-47)

Bornhauser: With the possible exception of Pound’s Cantos, I can think of no poetic work of the twentieth century longer than your trilogy. Most of us, brought up on Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, are used to close meticulous reading of even the simplest lyrics. Clearly, that kind of analysis does not always work. What guidelines or warnings would you give the reader of the long poem? Merrill: I too was teethed on Brooks and Warren. I learned to read, and to write, with as much care as possible. Before them, Keats had spoken of loading every rift with ore. And isn’t “God lurks in the details” the motto of the Warburg Institute? The best I could hope for from a reader is that he keeps one eye on the ever-emerging (and self-revising) whole, and another on the details. A lot of the talk sounds like badinage, casual if not frivolous, but something serious is usually going on under the surface. (An Interview with Fred Bornhauser, conducted by correspondence in Octorber 1981, pg. 54)

McClatchy: In a sense, Proust has been the greatest influence on your career, wouldn’t you agree?
Merrill: I would.
McClatchy: Odd for a poet to have a novelist over his shoulder.
Merrill: Why? I certainly didn’t feel his influence when I was writing novels. My attention span when writing or “observing” is so much shorter than his, that it’s only in a poem—in miniature as it were—that something of his flavor might be felt.
McClatchy: Speaking of influences, one could mention Stevens, Auden, Bishop, a few others. What have you sought to learn form other poets, and how in general have you adapted their example to your practice?
Merrill: Oh, I suppose I’ve learned things about writing, technical things, from each of them. Auden’s penultimate rhyming, Elizabeth’s way of contradicting something she’s just said, Stevens’ odd glamorizing of philosophical terms. (An Interview with J.D. McClatchy, Summer 1982, pg. 78)