scholarly journals The eros of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover.

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Poile
Keyword(s):  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

Merrill's the Changing Light at Sandover

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-53
Author(s):  
Evans Lansing Smith
Keyword(s):  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

scholarly journals Canon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Harrison Smith
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

The Critical Introduction, titled "James Merrill's Queer Muse," uses Queer Theory to analyze Merrill's creative process when writing The Changing Light at Sandover. It argues that Merrill queers the heteronormative orientation of the eroticized relationship between poet and muse. This heteronormative dynamic is exemplified by the twentieth-century's most famous poet to draw on occult inspiration, W.B. Yeats. Merrill is both explicit and implicit in rejecting Yeats' assertive, decidedly masculine approach to his presumed female muse, emphasizing the poet's passivity toward and equality with the muse in the creative process. The second part is a collection of poems titled "Canon." Each of the collection's sixty-six poems is written in conversation with a book of the Protestant Bible, and each poem uses only the words found in its corresponding book.

“It’s all by someone else!”

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Christopher K. Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover is the outstanding visionary long poem of late twentieth-century American literature. Despite its somewhat unusual mode of composition and the rather eccentric heavenly pantheon with which Merrill claims to have communicated, Sandover is presented as the transmission of an authentic prophetic message and the narrative of the manner in which that message was received. One of the more intriguing aspects of the text is its self-reflexive nature. A substantial amount of the poem’s dialogue and a number of narrative manipulations interrogate the technologies of the poem’s composition and the relation of Merrill’s medium and method to his task as the author of a sacred text in a skeptical age. These internal tests ultimately confirm his efforts by celebrating the most basic element of any author’s craft—language—as not only the medium for the message but also the mechanism of humankind’s redemption.

A Collected Unconscious: James Merrill’s Dictionaries

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-237
Author(s):  
Andrew Blades
Keyword(s):  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
James Merrill ◽  
American Heritage Dictionary ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
American Heritage ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill sketches a tableau of his study, singling out his hardbound set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, dictionaries were never far from his desk, and their presence is felt in much of his poetry, from interpolated definitions to pastiche etymologies and puns whose effectiveness depends upon a deep and lasting knowledge of the OED and American Heritage Dictionary. This essay takes as its starting point Merrill’s belief that dictionaries constitute a ‘collective unconscious’, discussing how the spirits of the dead are invoked not just by way of Merrill’s poetic experiments with Ouija boards, but through his ongoing fascination with the buried histories of words themselves. In close readings of Sandover, as well as some of Merrill’s later lyrics, it charts the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with acts of definition, and suggests that his poetry ultimately takes more delight in the ramifications of words than their roots.

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