Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Collected Poems, a thousand-page volume, includes new poems that were unpublished at the time of Merton's death. These new poems do not exhibit startling changes in technique, yet there are several points to be noted; interesting is the fact that Merton continued to experiment with various techniques. Thus, while many of his final shorter poems are conventional, others...