SOURCE: "The End of More than a Book," in The New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1995, p. 3.

[Merwin is an esteemed American poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and translator. In the following review of A Scattering of Salts, he assesses Merrill's body of work and writes that this final collection of poems "seemed to be telling me that the extraordinary cumulative wealth of this corpus was arriving at a final form."]

There may exist somewhere a cache of juvenilia by James Merrill, early verses, precocious but clumsy, scarcely formed, patently imitative, perhaps even pretentious. But it is hard to believe. First because Merrill, disciple of perfection that he was, might well have destroyed any such crudities unless he had been tempted to save them as relatively simple memorabilia, for we see his (and our) ambivalent attitudes toward childhood and childish things surfacing again and again through his poems: the...