SOURCE: “Monsters Wrapped in Silk: James Merrill's Country of a Thousand Years of Peace,” in Contemporary Poetry, Vol. IV, No. 4, 1982, pp. 1-30.

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

Eight years elapsed between James Merrill's First Poems (1951) and the publication of The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, the longest interval between any two of his poetry collections. During that time Merrill made two important moves. One, his change of residence from New York City to Stonington, a traditional Connecticut seacoast village, was a kind of strategic withdrawal and resettlement that had decisive repercussions on his work, though not until Water Street (1962) does a more domestic focus prevail. The other move, an elaborate and prolonged trip around the world, is more immediately apparent in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. The literal extravagance of Merrill's...