The publisher’s blurb for A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill states that Merrill is “one of the twentieth century’s last great letter writers.” The claim is bold since even the limited field of Merrill’s contemporaries includes the epistolary artists Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and even T. S. Eliot when writing passionately to his muse Emily Hale. Yet the letter writer I find most like Merrill is the nineteenth century’s Lord Byron. Both poets left their sexually oppressive homelands to explore the world and write letters that are rich in local color and acutely conscious of their correspondents’ interests. Both are full of gossip, word plays, quotations and original verses, satirical anecdotes, and confessions about what Merrill in “Days of 1964” and Byron in Don Juan called the “illusion” of love. Like Byron’s, Merrill’s letters express a sense of place and the immediacy of his life. He begins...
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