Tentative in title, cannily ambiguous in structure and content, [Scripts for the Pageant] are no more ambiguous in spirit, no less committedly affirmative, than the Paradiso to which they are already being compared. (p. 532)

To have the poem now completed is like the reception of an immense, unhoped-for present: the long poem that it's been proved a hundred times over we can't expect in this age of anxiety, privatism, fragmentation and the loss of the confidence and will to speak any public language…. At its completion Merrill, like Prospero, breaks the mirror that has been since Ephraim the symbol of his poetic field, as well as what it was in actuality, the central focus of the room where his spirits gathered. He does not drown his book, however, but leaves it for us to read and live with….

The trilogy [commencing with Ephraim and Mirabell] is sufficiently unlike...