Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by James Merrill

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet James Merrill.
Last updated on November 24, 2024.
James Merrill

James Ingram Merrill was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.

And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.
Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays. — © James Merrill
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
The simplest science book is over my head.
Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.
At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.
I'd like to think the scientists need us - but do they? Did Newton need Blake?
He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.
In life, there are no perfect affections.
But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.
Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
Class is classlessness.
The day is breaking someone else's heart.
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