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In James Merrill’s Letters, a Workshop and a Stage for the Poet’s 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 he’d been sent from several different men, fearing that they presented her son with a “threat of exposure.” Recounting this incident in “A Different Person” (1993), his too-little-known autobiography, Merrill pointed out how “it never occurred to the alarmists that a person who made no secret of his life was a sorry target for blackmail.” As years passed and his romantic activity remained forthright and far-flung, his mother became, for the most part, “forbearance itself.” She is one of h ....

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