James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim, Annotated and Introduced by Stephen Yenser (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
There is a lovely moment in Langdon Hammer’s biography of James Merrill [pictured at left circa 1967] , in which Merrill reports that he wrote poems largely because he eagerly awaited Stephen Yenser’s commentary. (Imagine Milton saying something similar about Andrew Marvell, his best early reader, as he rolled out book after book of Paradise Lost.) Merrill never seemed to lack inspiration, and he discovered in the Ouija board one of the twentieth century’s more fascinating and fantastical habitations for the muse. But Merrill’s remark contains more than a grain of truth along with much gratitude. And gratitude, too, is what every admirer of his work must feel who comes upon Knopf's recent publication of Merrill's The Book of Ephraim(Knopf) with an introduction and commentary than Stephen Yenser.
The publication constitutes a major moment in Merrill studies, and the study of twentieth-century American poetry generally. It marks the further coming of age of Ephraim as a canonical book of verse by inviting comparison with other well-annotated editions of single, long (or longish) poems by Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Stevens, a prospect widened when, in passing, Yenser suggests Merrill’s small epic as a modern epyllion. The genre flows variably in English from Ovid’s Metamorphosis—that masterful book of flux involving gods and humans--through Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Milton’s Paradise Regained, and perhaps into the present in some of Ephraim’s immediate contemporaries, such as Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Hecht’s “Venetian Vespers.” In the background of Merrill’s poem, of course, is always Dante’s Commedia, or, rather the foreground if we recall, as we should, that Ephraim originally appeared as the final poem of Merrill’s Divine Comedies, published in 1976, but no longer in print.
One virtue in publishing Ephraim as a stand-alone paperback edition, then, is simply making the work readily available, whether to be consumed in the classroom, on a patio, or in route somewhere. (I first read it in the air on a transatlantic flight.) All of these spaces or places seem thematically relevant to a poem as light-fingered in execution as it is compact with allusion and wide ranging in geographical references. A second virtue, as the introduction lucidly spells out and the notes tactfully amplify, is that Ephraim represents an important moment in Merrill’s unusual evolution as a poet. As a book of individual lyrics, it looks back to the earlier poems; but as a book, with a deliberate organizational scheme and some vertiginous ascents and descents, it inaugurates Merrill’s epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, of which Ephraim is the first installment. Without worrying every connection, Yenser makes the case for Ephraim inhabiting the radiating center of Merrill’s oeuvre.
The chief virtue of the edition, of course, is the remarkable tête à tête between JM and his Trinitarian scholarly editor-critic-poet, SY. Yenser, the editor, helps us with basic information: glossing names, places, and dates, which is not as simple as it sounds. In Ephraim, people have their fictional counterparts—their patrons—in both the book and the ill-starred, lost novel that serves as palimpsest, source, and prose foil to the poem’s many virtuosities. The task is accomplished with elegance and economy, initially in the introduction, and then with timely reminders at various points later in the commentary. The editor also glosses foreign phrases, sorts through quotations (especially helpful in “Q,”)—and, trickier still, through the occasional pseudo-quotation, and the many references of a word or two to other texts that range in size from George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Issa’s “famous haiku.”
Yenser, the critic, extends this concern with sources by attending to meanings that accrue through a vast network of allusions—the fractal element of Merrill’s art. Merrill is a remarkably “mythic” poet, one of the great heirs of modernism, and yet somehow Yenser makes tracking down and tracing out these stories and motifs, whether through Jung, Wagner, Joyce, Proust, Yeats or even George Herbert, seem easy, a natural extension of an endlessly alert and luminous mind on the part of poet and his exemplary reader. In the process, the critic offers helpful advice about underlying principles operating in Ephraim, including, as it turns out, the recognition that there is “no principle without its parody” (p. 186). Rarely, if ever, does Yenser descend to the blight of paraphrase.
And then there is Yenser the poet. We eavesdrop on conversations dating back to the composition of the poem and understand some of the choices Merrill made in revision—what Merrill describes, thrillingly to my ear, in “X” as “this net of loose talk tightening into verse.” Commentary on “L” includes a little gem of an essay on Merrill’s linguistic habits. Likewise illuminated are Merrill’s many formal practices--of deftly integrating sonnets into a chapter’s larger structural unit, for instance--or slight, but always substantive, shifts in meter and form. A little Yenser dazzler unveils Merrill on the challenge of matching Dante’s terza rima in “W.” Few are more alert to the formal calculus of verse—Merrill’s habitual preference for chiastic structures, for example, amid fluency--and to wordplay--puns, Spoonerisms, reversible meanings and their occult possibilities as parabolic scratches on a mirror—than Yenser. (See the crucial quotation from Eliot’s Middlemarch under M, N, and Y). On only a few occasions does Yenser, the scholar, editor, critic, and poet, let sheer appreciation surface, although we never doubt his passion for the poem or its artist. Admiration, rather, is cumulatively visible in the precision of each annotation and the care given to writing. We live by our words, Merrill said, somewhere, rightly, and as re-lived here.
Poem and introduction plus commentary are near numerological mirrors. Merrill’s ninety pages generate almost the exact same number from Yenser, an homage of sorts, but of an unusual kind, since there is plenty of room in Merrill’s richly polyphonic poem for further interpretation. Yenser, for all his scholarly amplitude, resists the desire to overwrite. He does what few editors do, whether of ancient or modern works: he gives readers not just the necessary information but a practical way to read Merrill’s great poem; then he sends them forth on their own. Yenser does not so much complete a conversation with the poet as show us how to continue one. I can’t imagine Merrill wishing it otherwise.
--Jonathan F. S. Post
See also Kelle Groom's 2014 piece on her tenancy at JM's Stonington Home.
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