from Amherst College in 1947. Much of his childhood has been recorded in his poetry, and in 1993 he examined his early maturity in the prose memoir titled
A Different Person, which deals with the period (1950-1952) when he lived in Europe and came of age poetically, psychologically, and sexually. For many years Merrill divided his time between Athens, Greece, and Stonington, Connecticut, where he shared houses with his longtime companion, David Jackson. In the last decade of his life Merrill more or less abandoned Athens in favor of Key West, Florida, although he continued to travel widely in the United States as well as abroad.
At the beginning of his career Merrill's poetry was recognized for its elegance and rococo presentation of artful objects and fanciful scenes; subsequently, his themes became more personal, more deeply plumbed, and more historically based, and critics and general readers began to take it more seriously. Two National Book Awards, in 1967 for Nights and Days (1966) and in 1979 for Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies (1976) augmented four early prizes from Poetry magazine (1947, 1949, 1951, and 1965); an award from the Bollingen Foundation (1972), the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover, and the Bobbit National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress in 1989 for The Inner Room (1988) rounded out the poet's many other honors and honorary degrees.
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