Published inBraving the Elements,"Days of 1935" was a fantasy narrative about being kidnapped as a boy, à la the "Lindbergh baby," reflecting a real fear the wealthy had after the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh's infant son, in…
Published in Late Settings, "Days of 1941 and '44" recalls Lawrenceville School and Merrill using his diaries to become a "poet of memory." The poem is dedicated to David Mixsell, his arch-nemesis at Lawrenceville, who would die in Europe in World…
"Looking at Mummy," Merrill's first poem at age 6, written in his mother's hand (so how much of it she may have written herself remains a question). This experience/poem later influenced “The Broken Home.”
These are the only surviving remnants of James Merrill's attempted Ouija board novel, in a folder labeled "Lost 70's Novel," in Merrill's hand. After losing two different prose drafts of the novel, he decided to write a verse narrative instead, which…
In this popular poem, Merrill reminisces about the summer of 1937, waiting for and then working on a jigsaw puzzle with his governess, Zelly, and her teaching him "her languages." "Lost in Translation" is often cited as Merrill's greatest short poem.…
Draft pages of "The Book of Ephraim" Section A, with corrections to the beginning, which addresses James Merrill's uncertainty over the format in which to tell this story. Claude Fredericks had convinced him it had to be in verse.
Draft pages from Section P, which is an important section about power and apocalypse that foreshadows the revelations in Mirabell: Book of Numbers and Scripts for the Pageant.
Typescript draft of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: Impressionism in Literature by James Merrill. This was written during Merrill's senior year at Amherst, 1946-1947.
Fifteen pages (out of sixty total) ofa corrected typescript draft ofAn Evening at Sandover, Merrill's first stage adaptation of the Ouija board epic, performed as part of the revived Poets' Theatre at Hasty Pudding theater at Harvard. Peter Hooten…