In the following excerpt, Labrie surveys the poetry of Merrill's Water Street, Nights and Days, and Braving the Elements.

In the following essay, Materer probes the mythic unconscious of Merrill's poetry.

In the following essay, McClatchy studies the elusive poems of Country of a Thousand Years of Peace.

In the following essay, Hallberg maintains that Merrill's work features an ironic criticism of the conventions of confessional poetry, and instead prefers evasion and secrecy.

In the following excerpt, Moffett calls The Changing Light at Sandover“Merrill's greatest achievement” and probes the sources of composition and themes of the work.

In the following review of Merrill's final poetry collection, Vendler investigates the retrospective verse of A Scattering of Salts.

[An American poet, critic, and educator, McClatchy was a close friend of Merrill's. In the following reminiscence, he discusses Merrill's development as a poet, surveying his life and works through personal insights and anecdotes.]

In the following excerpt, Yenser explores the themes, imagery, and structure of Merrill's Late Settings and his verse drama The Image Maker.

In the following essay, Ehrenpreis analyzes The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell, and Scripts for the Pageant as a related “three-part enterprise.”

In the following essay, originally published in 1977, Kalstone considers the verse of The Fire Screen, Braving the Elements, and Divine Comedies.

Merrill has absorbed into verse many of the resources of daily conversation and prose. Still, there is a special strangeness and sometimes strain to Merrill's colloquial style, a taut alertness to the meanings which lurk in apparently casual words and phrases. We may find this in all good poets, but Merrill raises it to a habit of vigilance, a quickened control and poise, sometimes bravado, which he clearly trusts as a source of power. When Merrill uses an idiom, he turns it over curiously, as if pro...

[Merwin is an esteemed American poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and translator. In the following review of A Scattering of Salts, he assesses Merrill's body of work and writes that this final collection of poems "seemed to be telling me that the extraordinary cumulative wealth of this corpus was arriving at a final form."]

[An American critic, poet, and educator, Yenser was a friend of Merrill's and wrote the study The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill (1987). In the following tribute, which was delivered at the New York Public Library on May 13, 1995, he offers his thoughts on why "James Merrill will be among the handful of poets by whom we remember this century."]

[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.]

[In the following obituary, Gussow describes Merrill as "heir to the lyrical legacy of W. H. Auden and Wallace Stevens."]

In Merrill's verse there is … something curiously old-fashioned—at least at first glance. In his wielding of poetic forms, Merrill is masterful…. Like his mentor Auden, Merrill can be so conversationally civilized in these forms that only half way through them does the reader suspect the strictness of the design. (pp. 9-10) Here's another way in which Merrill is old-fashioned: he never courts obscurity…. These are books of ideas (as well as of feelings, visions, peo...

Tentative in title, cannily ambiguous in structure and content, [Scripts for the Pageant] are no more ambiguous in spirit, no less committedly affirmative, than the Paradiso to which they are already being compared. (p. 532) To have the poem now completed is like the reception of an immense, unhoped-for present: the long poem that it's been proved a hundred times over we can't expect in this age of anxiety, privatism, fragmentation and the loss of the confidence and will to speak any public la...

[If one uses] the usual domestic routines, illnesses, visits, weather, a problem with wallpaper, a failure of the telephone, you have enough, given Mr. Merrill's inventiveness, to make a poem of 80 or 90 pages…. His common style is a net of loose talk tightening to verse, a mode in which nearly anything can be said with grace….

Scripts for the Pageant completes what may well be the most astonishing poem ever written by an American. There is no other word to describe James Merrill's trilogy…. Mirabell and Scripts raise so many profound questions about sacred poetry and the relation of the individual to the cosmos, that evading their doctrines would also entail ignoring the wisdom literature of Merrill's greatest predecessors—poets such as Dante, Homer, Milton, Blake. But this makes Scripts for the Pagean...