The Changing Light at Sandover

by James Merrill

  A selection of Merrill’s earliest writings, taken from his contributions to the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine, was privately printed by his father as a sixteenth-birthday gift in 1942, under the title Jim’s Book. The young writer proudly distributed most of the one hundred copies as soon as possible—and before long began to retrieve as many of those copies as he could. A group of his poems appeared in Poetry in March 1946, the same year that saw the publication in Athens, Greece, of a limited edition of poems entitled The Black Swan. He published his first full-fledged book, First Poems, when he was twenty-five, in 1951. He next tried his hand at playwriting: The Bait was produced at the Comedy Club in 1953 (and published in a journal in 1955 and in a book in 1960), and The Immortal Husband was performed at the Theater de Lys in 1955 (and published in 1956). Meanwhile, his first novel, The Seraglio, a Jamesian roman à clef, appeared in 1957 (it was reissued in 1987), and his second commercial volume of poems, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, in 1959 (revised edition, 1970). His third volume of poems, Water Street—its title refers to the street Merrill lived on in Stonington—came out in 1962, and his second, experimental novel, The (Diblos) Notebook, based in part on his first experiences in Greece, in 1965 (reissued in 1994).

  His 1966 collection Nights and Days received the National Book Award. The judges for that year, W. H. Auden, James Dickey, and Howard Nemerov, cited the book for its author’s “scrupulous and uncompromising cultivation of the poetic art evidenced in his refusal to settle for an easy and profitable stance; for his insistence on taking the kind of tough, poetic chances which make the difference between aesthetic success or failure.” The Fire Screen appeared in 1969, followed in 1972 by Braving the Elements, which was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and in 1974 by a selection of previously uncollected poems, The Yellow Pages. When Divine Comedies came out in 1976, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

  The narrative poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which was originally included in Divine Comedies, later served as the first installment of an epic visionary poem based in large part on Merrill and Jackson’s communications with the Other World by way of the Ouija board. The subsequent two parts were Mirabell: Books of Number, which appeared in 1978 and received the National Book Award for Poetry, and Scripts for the Pageant, published in 1980. In 1982 Merrill brought together these three long poems and “Coda: The Higher Keys” in a comprehensive edition of the work he now called The Changing Light at Sandover. That landmark volume won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The same year, Merrill published his first selected poems, From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976. His book of poems Late Settings was published in 1985, and a collection of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Recitative appeared in 1986. In 1988 The Inner Room was honored with the first Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress. Selected Poems 1946–1985 appeared in 1992, and his memoir, A Different Person, came out in 1993. A Scattering of Salts, the last book of poems that he saw through production, was published posthumously in 1995. His Collected Poems appeared in 2001, his Collected Novels and Plays in 2002, and his Collected Prose in 2004.

  A Note About the Editors

  J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser are James Merrill’s literary executors. J. D. McClatchy is the author of six volumes of poems and three collections of essays. He teaches at Yale and is the editor of The Yale Review. Stephen Yenser has written two volumes of poems and three books of criticism (one about Merrill). He is Distinguished Professor of English and the director of creative writing at UCLA.

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