SOURCE: "Another Past Recaptured," in Book World—The Washington Post, September 12, 1993, p. 4.

[Lehman is an American critic, poet, and educator whose works include James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (1983), for which he served as editor and a contributor, and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). In the following review of A Different Person: A Memoir, he lauds Merrill's prose style and his insights into love and passion.]

Elegant, graceful, puckish, lithe, James Merrill has steadily put his sonnets and intricate stanzas at the service of poignant autobiographical themes and expansive narrative ends. With rare candor and rarer tact James Merrill has explored the broken home of his upper-class childhood, the romance of art and myth and dreams and travel, his aestheticism, his homosexuality and the whole rich gamut of experiences available to a man who was always spared the financial angst that plagues...