THE CONSUMING MYTH: THE WORKS OF JAMES...

THE CONSUMING MYTH: THE WORKS OF JAMES MERRILL by Stephen Yenser (Harvard University: $27.50; 363 pp., illustrated). This dense, brilliant, tangled, critical biography is aimed at a special reader: comfortable with occasionally translated French and German, familiar with the literary tradition and with James Merrill’s poems, a lover of puzzles with missing pieces. Merrill’s life (1926-) is here, well in the background, marked by his two novels, two plays, 12 books of poems, assorted playlets740320627well-deserved awards (Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards). In the foreground, Stephen Yenser, a UCLA English professor, places the writing, in particular the poetry, for detailed explication.

These explications are a marvel of insight, unraveling and illuminating what Yenser aptly calls Merrill’s “incomparable technique.” One yearns at times for explications of the explications, as the prose complexity rivals that of the poems under examination. “All is metamorphosis,” Yenser tells us an early poem suggests: “The world is all ‘context,’ its elements are all a fugacity whose interactive events may be either continuations of earlier phases of themselves or ever-new processes.” But what else is an explicator to do with such a poet, concerned as he is with “raveling phrase and reversible truth”? His poems “usually conceal and compose and cost,” so we cannot expect too much of a discount from a responsible critic. Einstein warned us that everything should be as simple as possible, “but no simpler.”

Those willing and able to stay with Yenser’s style will enter deeply into the work of a singularly important contemporary poet, as well as into the nature of poetry itself.