SOURCE: “Transparent Things,” in Modern Critical Views: James Merrill, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 57-67.

In the following essay, originally published in 1977, Kalstone considers the verse of The Fire Screen, Braving the Elements, and Divine Comedies.

It would be interesting to know at what point Merrill saw a larger pattern emerging in his work—the point at which conscious shaping caught up with what unplanned or unconscious experience had thrown his way. In retrospect a reader can see that Braving the Elements (1972) gathers behind it the titles—with full metaphorical force—of Merrill's previous books. In The Country of a Thousand years of Peace, Water Street, Nights and Days and The Fire Screen, he had referred to the four elements braved in the book which followed them. (Divine Comedies extends it one realm further.) The books do present experience under different aspects, almost as under...