Exhibit Items from the 1950s
- TWENTY-ONE LYRICS
[Amherst,
Massachusetts]: Amherst College, [1950]
Blue-green stapled wrappers, with title in black on front cover within a
decorative border.
Printed at The Vermont Printing Co., Brattleboro, Vermont.
Gift of James Merrill
This pamphlet, produced for the Humanities 1-2 classes at Amherst,
includes Merrill's poem "The Broken Bowl", which had already appeared in
his privately-printed collection, The Black Swan (1946).
Textually, there are no changes between the two, but one word -- "face"
for "space" in the final stanza--has been changed by the time the
poem appears in First Poems the next year. Radical revisions occur
thirty years later when From the First Nine is published.
-
TEN STUDENT POEMS [cover title]
[Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst College, ca. 1951]
Off-white stapled wrappers, with title in black on front cover.
The subtitle on the cover reads "A Selection of Poetry Composed by
Students in English 23-24, Advanced Composition, at Amherst College,
1944-1951". The pamphlet includes "The Forms of Death" by James
Merrill, marking the poem's first appearance in book form.
Accompanying the pamphlet is a three-page draft of the poem showing
changes in title, dedication, and a few lines in the first section. More
importantly, the worksheets include a second section, later abandoned.
A subsequent draft in the Merrill Papers is dated 1946. The poem was
apparently not collected elsewhere, although it did appear in a 1948
issue of Accent magazine, with the second section still intact.
-
FIRST POEMS
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
Edition limited to 990 numbered copies. This is copy 855.
Maroon cloth over boards with author printed in blind on front cover, and
Borzoi logo in blind on rear cover; author, title and publisher printed
in gold on spine. Off-white endpapers. White dust jacket printed in
olive-green.
Accompanied by the final typescript of the poems, some with revisions,
and two pages of typescript notes about four of the poems.
Merrill's first trade book is dedicated to Frederick Buechner, his
friend from Lawrenceville days. First Poems retains all the poems
most worth keeping from The Black Swan; the book received a large
number of reviews and a great deal of favorable critical attention.
The final typescript is open to "Foliage of Vision" accompanied by
Merrill's formal source notes about the poems, which were
prepared at an unidentified time and apparently unpublished.
-
MANDRAKE Vol. II, No. 8
(Spring and Summer 1952)
Edited by Arthur Boyars.
Gift of James Merrill with his pencilled annotations
Accompanied by James Merrill's Notebook, labelled "August 28 1950 - 14
June 1951 Venice-Rome", and poetry worksheets, 5 pp.
Gift of James Merrill
These pieces afford an excellent opportunity to study the development of
one poem, "The Charioteer of Delphi". The James Merrill Papers hold 13
of his notebooks, dating from about 1947 to 1964. The earliest lines for
the poem show up in July 1950 in the notebook preceding this one; some of
the drafts of "Charioteer of Delphi" are dated later that fall and
winter. Subsequent re-writings of the poem may be studied in the
worksheets also shown here. The poem was first published in the British
magazine, Mandrake, in 1952, and James Merrill's copy bears
several revisions in his hand, which appear in the poem when it is collected
seven years later in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace and Other
Poems.
-
FOLDER, Volume I, Number I (Winter 1953)
New York: Tiber press, 1953.
Limited to 500 numbered copies. This is copy 320.
Loose sheets, some folded, laid in a printed folder.
Merrill has contributed two short poems to the first issue of this
periodical: "Water Boiling" and "Night Laundry" under the heading "Two
Chores". These poems later appear in The Country of a Thousand Years
of Peace and Other Poems under the heading "Three Chores" along with
the third, "Italian Lesson." Other contributors include John Ashbery and
Frank O'Hara. "Night Laundry" is also included in Merrill's first
British collection, Selected Poems, published in London in 1961.
-
SHORT STORIES
Pawlet, Vermont: The Banyan Press, 1954
Limited to 210 numbered copies, 60 for sale and 150 for friends of the
poet and the printer. This is copy 51, inscribed to William Jay
Smith and Barbara Howes, September 1954.
Cockerell sewn wrappers, with white paper label printed in black.
Of these nine poems, dedicated to David Jackson and impeccably printed by
Claude Fredericks, five are first appearances. All but one of the poems,
"Gothic Novel", are included five years later in The Country of a
Thousand Years of Peace and Other Poems. Washington University is
fortunate to have a second inscribed copy of Short Stories,
given to the Library by Mrs. Hellen I. Plummer in 1982.
-
A BIRTHDAY CAKE FOR DAVID FROM JAMEY, JIMMY & CLAUDE WITH
GREETINGS FERVID
Pawlet, Vermont: The Banyan Press, 1955.
Limited to four copies, each imprinted with the recipient's name. This
is James Merrill's copy.
Gift of James Merrill
Broadside, 8 3/4" x 6 3/4".
Off-white sheet printed in black.
This is the only appearance of the poem, published in celebration of
David Jackson's birthday. Drafts of the poem are included in the
James Merrill Papers held at Washington University.
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PLAYBOOK: FIVE PLAYS FOR A NEW THEATRE
[Norfolk, Connecticut]: New Directions, [1956]
Black cloth, title and publisher in silver on spine; dust jacket in blue
and brown.
ARTISTS' THEATRE FESTIVAL/1968.
Unpaged program. Stiff white wrappers
printed in deep pink.
"The Immortal Husband", James Merrill's three-act play, was first
produced by John Bernard Myers in association with The Artists' Theatre
at the Theatre de Lys in New York on February 14, 1955, directed by
Herbert Machiz.
Among many admiring reviewers, Tennessee Williams commented: "James
Merrill is my favorite young American Poet and he has written a play
which is pure poetry plus theatre, a rare and magical combination."
The play was revived in the summer of 1968 when the Artists' Theatre was
in residence at Southampton College. The festival catalog, open here to
Richard Hayes' piece on Merrill's play, entitled "The Imagination of
Time", is preceded by John Bernard Myers' interesting essay about the
founding and development of the Artists' Theatre, which was dedicated to
presenting "plays by writers who were primarily poets and serious thinkers."
-
THE SERAGLIO
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.
First edition.
Blue paper over boards with red cloth spine; title printed in blind on
front cover, Borzoi logo in blind on rear cover; author, title
and publisher printed in gold on spine; white endpapers; top edge blue;
white dust jacket printed in red, black and yellow, with
a photograph of James Merrill by Rollie McKenna on the back wrapper.
THE SERAGLIO
London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
First English edition.
Navy blue cloth over boards; title, author and publisher printed in gold
on spine; white endpapers. Dust jacket printed in bright pink and black.
Other than the narrative sketches published during his
school days, The Seraglio, Merrill's first novel, is his first
published fiction. The novel, which is partly autobiographical in its
general outline, has been praised for its skilled handling of point
of view, its exquisite attention to setting, and its
impressive descriptive power. The jacket copy on the United States
edition quotes Truman Capote: "Happily, these excellent accents and
images are used to examine, from a convincingly Inside point of
view, an atmosphere and a theme seldom described in serious
American fiction: a universe of high-powered finance, high voltage
sensibility."
-
VOICES: A JOURNAL OF POETRY
Number 166 (May-August, 1958)
Edited by Harold Vinal
Gift of James Merrill
According to a cover note, James Merrill served as Editorial Assistant
for this issue. He also contributed a book review, signed
only with his initials, entitled "The Relic, Promises and Poems". The
four authors reviewed are Robert Hillyer, Robert Penn Warren,
William Jay Smith and William Meredith. To his admirers' regret,
James Merrill has published very little criticism.
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THE COUNTRY OF A THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE AND OTHER
POEMS
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.
First edition.
Pink cloth; author's name in blind on upper front cover and Borzoi logo
in blind on lower rear cover; author, title and
publisher printed in gold on spine; white endpapers; top edge light
blue. White dust jacket printed in purple, with text of
poem, "Marsyas", from the book, reproduced on the back wrapper.
THE COUNTRY OF A THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE AND OTHER POEMS
New York: Atheneum, 1970.
First Revised Edition on copyright page; New and Enlarged Edition on
wrappers.
Stiff white wrappers, printed in lavender and medium and dark brown. A
second printing, so indicated on the title page and verso,
occurred in February 1977.
In the revised edition, three new poems have been added, "The Day of the
Eclipse", "Walking All Night", and "The Power Station", previously
uncollected but written during the same period. One poem, "Saint"
has been deleted. This second major collection of Merrill's poems --
described as a watershed volume and exuberantly well-received -- includes
"Voices from the Other World", his earliest (ca. 1955) poem involving
the realm of the Ouija board.
-
ANGEL
Stonington, Connecticut: [no publisher], 1959.
First edition. Limited to 180 copies.
Broadside, 7" x 3 1/2".
Pink leaf printed in red.
"Angel" was published by James Merrill as a private
Christmas greeting.
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