Browse Items (62 total)

Lawrentian, vol. 56 no. 1. This issue of the Amherst alumni magazine features a cover story on poetry entitled "The Uncertain Future of Poetry" that contains an interview with James Merrill.

North Star: A Book of Poems, a privately printed book (first edition, with only 1 printed copy) containing poems by James Merrill and Frederick Buechner dedicated to and donated to this collection by Gerrish Thurber. Merrill and Buechner made the…

Achapbook published by Claude Fredericks, a poet, printer, playwright and teacher who had a romantic relationship with Merrill in the early 1950s, and who remained a lifelong friend. All but one of the nine poems in this collection were later…

The Black Swan, Kimon Friar's privately printed book of James Merrill's college poetry, probably at least partially financed by Merrill, himself. This copy inscribed to "Jonnie."

Typescript draft of The Black Swan by James Merrill.

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…

A chapbook, set and printed by Claude Fredericks and David Beekin. Printed by Banyan Press in an edition of 440. This is the section of Mirabell: Books of Number when 741 reveals the hierarchy of the arts and the spiritual meaning of homosexuality,…

The Yellow Pages cover mock-up for the paperback edition of this limited edition volume, which compiled uncollected poems composed between 1946 and 1971. The book was published in cloth (50 copies) and paperback editions (750-800 copies) by Temple…

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…

James Merrill reads his poem "164 East 72nd Street" at Washington University's Simon Hall in 1994.