622 The American Century: Literature since 1945stripped of conclusive choices: “I cannot decide in what direction to walk,” the poet
admits in “Grand Galop,” adding happily, “ / But this doesn’t matter to me.” Lacking
such determinants, the coordination of a particular road taken, it too becomes
shadowy, as shifting and irresolute as the language that enacts its absence, its baffling
and blank contingency.
“All was strange”: the closing remark in “A Wave” sounds a theme that resonates
through Ashbery’s poetry and the work of other contemporary American poets, not
all of them necessarily identified with the New York group. The metamorphoses of
consciousness, the absolute ravishment of the senses by the radiant surfaces of the
world are, for instance, the primary intuitions of a writer who is in many respects
hauntingly different from Ashbery or O’Hara, James Merrill (1926–1995). Merrill is
commonly associated with the disciples of the New Critical school and, in a strictly
formal sense, there is some truth to this association: much of his work, to be found
in Collected Poems (2001), is characterized by a delicate, ironic verbal wit, formal
prosody, careful crafting of syntax and metaphor, and a baroque sense of decor.
He betrays traces of the confessional tendency too, in that some of his poems deal
with painful autobiographical material: his tangled erotic involvement with his
mother, say (“The Broken Home,” “Emerald”), his fiercely oedipal relationship with
his father (“Scenes from Childhood”), or the pleasures and pains of being a
homosexual (“Days of 1964,” “Mornings in a New House”). That said, however, it
has to be added that Merrill begins and ends where Ashbery and O’Hara do: with
what Merrill himself, in “Transfigured Bird,” calls “the eggshell of appearance.” There
may be a perilous abyss beneath this surface, perhaps, but what Merrill senses always
is the inevitability and necessity of masks, screens, fictions. In fact, the eye that
attempts to peer beneath the “glassen surface” of things is for him a kind of predator –
a monster. Life, in Merrill’s view, is “fiction in disguise.” As poets and as people, our
function is to skim over the surfaces that constitute our known world “with an
assurance of safety – the thoughtful ease of someone skating upon a sheet of ice ...
formed above a black torrent.” This may be “a form of light,” Merrill admits, “but it
is also a form of healing”: the surfaces we stay poised above are “protecting” ones,
sheltering us from waste and anxiety, unconditional surrender to the void.
If Merrill’s lyric poems aestheticize autobiography, reflecting what he calls
“the dull need to make some kind of house / Out of the life lived, and out of the love
spent,” then his epic trilogy mentioned earlier, The Changing Light at Sandover,
expresses a larger desire to create an aesthetic for survival. Written in a variety of
poetic forms, the trilogy was the result, Merrill claimed, of a communion with
spirits: into it he poured his beliefs and fears, spread among passages of revelation
that were spelled out to him on a ouija board. “The design of the book swept me
along,” he said: this is an epic as formless and personal, as locked into process and
possibility, as all other American epics. It can sometimes be as absurd or narcissistic
as, say, “Song of Myself,” as, for instance, when the poet tries to argue that homosexuals
are the ultimate triumph of evolution, the true creators of poetry and music,
“THOSE 2 PRINCIPAL LIGHTS OF GOD BIOLOGY.” Equally, it can be as obscure
as the Cantos or The Maximus Poems occasionally are, as prosaic as passages inGGray_c05.indd 622ray_c 05 .indd 622 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM