April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.
April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.
As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor krcu.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from krcu.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In James Merrillâs Letters, a Workshop and a Stage for the Poetâs Wit
James Merrill found that letters suited him better than essays. Quick literary judgments became an epistolary specialty.Credit.The New London Day
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By Thomas Mallon
A WHOLE WORLD
Edited by Langdon Hammer and Stephen Yenser
When he was 25 and traveling abroad, the poet James Merrill (1926-95) learned that his mother had destroyed letters heâd been sent from several different men, fearing that they presented her son with a âthreat of exposure.â Recounting this incident in âA Different Personâ (1993), his too-little-known autobiography, Merrill pointed out how âit never occurred to the alarmists that a person who made no secret of his life was a sorry target for blackmail.â As years passed and his romantic activity remained forthright and far-flung, his mother became, for the most part, âforbearance itself.â She is one of her sonâs many co