James Merrill's poem "Death Masks" from an issue of the Lawrenceville publication The Lit. The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by a man who sells death masks made from the faces of artists.
Water Street marks a turning point in James Merrill's writing; the book is "local and particular: it calls attention to where, and by implication how, the poet is living." Included here are the covers of two 1962 editions, with inscriptions and an…
The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, first published in 1959, contains poems written over an eight-year period, which "are a collection of symbols and epiphanies drawn from experience but set off from it in an ideal, timeless space, a…
James Merrill reads from his piece "The Changing Light at Sandover," a poem based on his and David Jackson's experiences with their Ouija board seances, at the first James Merrill Symposium. He is accompanied here by Peter Hooten voicing the…
James Merrill reads "The Pruned Tree" by Howard Moss (poetry editor of the New Yorker and friend of Merrill's) and "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop at the first James Merrill Symposium.