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James Merrill

I lived from 1926-1995. I was from the United States.

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.

My poetry

  • Another April
    The panes flash, tremble with your ghostly passage
    Through them, an x-ray sheerness billowing, and I have risen
    7 lines
  • Manos Karastefanes
    Death took my father.
    The same year (I was twelve)
    29 lines
  • A mysterious epigraph
    These days which, like yourself,
    Seem empty and effaced
    3 lines
  • The Victor Dog
    Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez,
    The little white dog on the Victor label
    48 lines
  • The Puzzle is no Puzzle
    A card table in the library stands ready
    To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
    26 lines
  • Log
    Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
    I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
    4 lines
  • An Urban Convalescence
    Out for a walk, after a week in bed,
    I find them tearing up part of my block
    101 lines
  • Yánnina
    for Stephen Yenser                       
    "There lay the peninsula stre
    159 lines

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