LANGDON HAMMER is professor of English and American Studies and
chair of the English Department at Yale University. His books
include Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and, as
editor for the Library of America, Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and
Selected Letters and May Swenson: Collected Poems. A former
Guggenheim fellow and fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he has
written about poetry for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book
Review, and The American Scholar, where he is poetry editor. His
lectures on modern poetry are available free online at Yale Open
Courses.
www.jamesmerrillweb.com
"A gorgeously written and elegantly comprehensive study of the
tumult and passion of Merrill’s Life and Art."--The Economist
"A fascinating, engrossing portrait of a deeply lived
life."--Tobias Carroll, Biographile
"[Hammer] sums up people and milieus with strong, deft strokes. The
historian and the critic in him are in elegant synchronicity. He
goes to work on Merrill’s outsize life like a master fishmonger
carving a bluefin tuna. Every cut is measured. Nothing is wasted.
The best and fattiest bits – the poetry, in this case – are
reserved, like sashimi, for special use."--Dwight Garner, The New
York Times
"By a wide margin the largest, most detailed, and most
convincingly atmospheric biography ever written about Merrill – it
has all the rhetorical and bibliographical flavor of a durable
landmark. It’s considerably helped along toward that goal by
Hammer’s lively storytelling style. . . James Merrill: Life and
Art is a brilliantly marshaled biography of a surprisingly
elusive subject."--Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“Langdon Hammer’s richly textured biography of James Merrill’s life
and art, which are so inextricably intertwined, is a work of great
candor, insight, and sympathetic imagination. It is a
magisterial achievement.”––Edward Hirsch
“This is an overwhelming book. Very few writers have been as
intimately portrayed--or had their work as illuminatingly read--as
James Merrill in Langdon Hammer's prodigious biography. His
empathetic yet clear-eyed account shows how Merrill's exquisite
"feeling for the word" merged with his lust for living in an
idiosyncratic artistic heroism that produced some of the great
lyric poetry of the late twentieth century.”
––Jonathan Galassi
“Fabulously wealthy, gay, prodigiously gifted, Merrill emerges in
this stunningly capacious and moving biography in his full
complexities: a generous man who thought himself cold; a Jamesian
sensibility flinging himself upon the thorns of life; a meticulous
formalist who submitted to the occult; a man who hid his
HIV-positive status but became, one now sees, one of the major
poets of the AIDS crisis. Merrill has found in Langdon Hammer
a biographer of enormous discernment, grace and style: it is all
here, indefatigably researched, delicately sifted, astutely judged,
beautifully written.”––Maureen N. McLane
“Discovering James Merrill's profound masterwork, "The Changing
Light at Sandover," just as AIDS was beginning to alter the way we
lived then and now saved many a soul. His portrait of gay
domesticity that rarely noticed its own difference not only
challenged the idea of "queerness" in literature, but in the world.
Langdon Hammer's epic study of an epic mind is essential not only
to our understanding of the prolific poet, but to the art of
biography. Beautifully written and reasoned, Hammer's book
possesses all the qualities Merrill prized in his own work, and
life: humor, narrative energy, acute observation and analysis that
is profound because it is true.”––Hilton Als
“Meticulously researched, Langdon Hammer's James Merrill chronicles
the life of a poet who believed nothing is lost-- and whose poetry
of personal experience, sifted by sensibility, is a poetry of
mirror and mask, flesh and spirit, disclosure and secrecy. Most of
all, it's a poetry, and a life, crafted from the sublime and the
elemental, brilliantly mixed, which Hammer interprets with tender
insight and wise sympathy.”––Brenda Wineapple
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