SOURCE: "Braving the Elements," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXXI, No. 5, March 27, 1995, pp. 49-52, 59-61.

[An American poet, critic, and educator, McClatchy was a close friend of Merrill's. In the following reminiscence, he discusses Merrill's development as a poet, surveying his life and works through personal insights and anecdotes.]

The news that James Merrill had died last month in Arizona at the age of sixty-eight, of a sudden heart attack, caused a palpable shock in the literary world. Spontaneous tributes and readings sprang up all around the country. Disbelieving letters and phone calls crisscrossed the circle of professional writers. Not since a starry chapter closed in the nineteen-seventies with the deaths of W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop has the loss of an American poet been as momentous, or as widely acknowledged to be so.

That is in part because, however compelling Merrill's ambitions or demanding...