The Poetry of Privilege

August Kleinzahler says in his NYTBR review of James Merrill’s Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser for Alfred A. Knopf in 2008, “Merrill has few peers, and none among contemporary poets working in meter and rhyme.” Kleinzahler goes on to say, “Merrill’s poetry will not be to everyone’s taste. He never intended it to be. He insists too often on being clever; he can go on too long and wreck what begins and continues for quite a few stanzas as a splendid poem written in ballad meter, ‘The Summer People,’ or he can choke a poem with detail, as he does in ‘Yánnina.’ Many readers will find the poetry mannered. It is, by design. The poet is an aesthete, a dandy in the Baudelairean sense, unabashedly so. One critic has referred to Merrill’s style as ‘New Critical Baroque.’ Rococo would probably be more apt. Where a straight line would do, Merrill cannot resist using filigree.”

That’s what I like, consistency. Oxymorons. Paradoxes. Bullshit.

I am seventy-four years old, so I’ve been reading James Merrill’s work for a long while; also the poetry of many another poet, and I can tell the reader this: There is many another rhyming and metering poet who writes (or wrote during Merrill’s time) poetry every bit as good as, or better than, his: Richard Wilbur (still living, thank fate), Howard Nemerov, Donald Justice, the Australian A. D. Hope who was twice or three times better — a great, if largely unsung poet, in fact — and there are several younger poets among the New Formalists who can write as well or better. I’m not going to name them as they are not close to being finished writing, and they are friends.

How does one manage to have a book of poetry reviewed in The New York Times Book Review? Well, let’s see, perhaps we can glean a hint. Kleinzahler tells us, “James Merrill was raised in Southampton, Long Island, and Manhattan amid extraordinary privilege and wealth.” In another essay, this one a review of one of Donald Hall’s memoirs in the same issue, Peter Stevenson writes, “Donald Hall was born into a New England realm of darkness and privilege. The family business was the Brock-Hall Dairy in Hamden, Conn. His father, Hall wrote in one poem, ‘hated his job at the Dairy, working for his father, and came home weeping’; he would rush from the room so his son would not see him cry.” Sad. But, of course, the sons and daughters of privilege need to suffer some too, don’t they?