James Merrill - quotes
Don't ask me to paraphrase his thesis - but, reading Jaynes as I was finishing Mirabell, I rather goggled. Because the poem is set by and large in two adjacent rooms: a domed red one where we took down the messages, and a blue one, dominated by an outsize mirror, where we reflected upon them.
About author
 James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and his second wife, Hellen Ingram. His parents were divorced in 1939. Merrill grew up in Manhattan and Southampton, New York. He was already writing poems by the time he was eight years old and when he was 16, at Lawrenceville School, his father had a book of Merrill's juvenile poems privately printed under the title of Jim's Book. Following Lawrenceville, Merrill went to Amherst College, where he met Robert Frost. His college studies were interrupted by military service in the US Army from 1944 to 19... |
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And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.
Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.
At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.
Because of its length and looniness I'd taken to calling it the Divine Comedy - not of course a usable title, until David Jackson thought of making it plural. Dante, subtler as always, let posterity affix the adjective.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.
Chiefly, I think, the - to me - unprecedented way in which the material came. Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought. More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone.
He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.
I'd like to think the scientists need us - but do they? Did Newton need Blake?
In life, there are no perfect affections.
Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
Oh, I picked up a two-volume Guide to Science by Asimov - very useful, still, each time I forget how the carbon atom is put together, or need to shake my head over elemental tables.
Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.
The simplest science book is over my head.
