Scripts for the Pageant completes what may well be the most astonishing poem ever written by an American. There is no other word to describe James Merrill's trilogy…. Mirabell and Scripts raise so many profound questions about sacred poetry and the relation of the individual to the cosmos, that evading their doctrines would also entail ignoring the wisdom literature of Merrill's greatest predecessors—poets such as Dante, Homer, Milton, Blake.

But this makes Scripts for the Pageant sound much grimmer than it is. Actually, the poem reads as a swirl of voices, a choral symposium that sounds at times like heroic opera….

No brief review can do justice to the diverse plenitude of Scripts for the Pageant. The scope of Merrill's wit is breathtaking; it has become an intellectual force fusing together the unlikeliest of myths and concepts.

Charles Berger, "Poetic Spirits of the Modern Age," in Book...