Divine Comedies
by James Merrill
Summary
Divine Comedies gathers a set of polished, formally accomplished domestic lyrics, poems of travel, friendship, and daily life written in James Merrill's characteristic wit and wordplay, and then pairs them with something genuinely strange: "The Book of Ephraim," a long poem transcribed, in part, from years of Ouija board sessions Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, conducted together at their table.
The domestic poems show Merrill working at the height of his gift for traditional meter and rhyme handled with real conversational ease, wit and elegance turned toward ordinary subjects, a visit, a memory, a household object, without ever losing formal control. "The Book of Ephraim" changes registers entirely: built from messages the couple believed they had received through the board from a spirit called Ephraim and, through him, other voices, the poem treats that material with the same worldly polish Merrill brought to his lyric poems, so that the occult content never collapses into either credulous mysticism or straightforward parody. That combination, the same elegant hand applied equally to a dinner party and a séance, is the book's real achievement, holding two very different kinds of poem inside one continuous sensibility.
Reading Divine Comedies means moving between short, immediately pleasurable formal lyrics and the longer, stranger patience "The Book of Ephraim" asks for, a poem that rewards a reader willing to take its otherworldly premise seriously enough to follow where it leads. It suits a reader who wants formal virtuosity paired with real imaginative risk, since Merrill never treats the two as opposites.
Historical Context & Significance
Divine Comedies won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, recognizing a collection that turned out to be only the opening movement of something much larger.
"The Book of Ephraim" became the first of three volumes Merrill would publish between 1976 and 1980, later combined into the 560 page epic The Changing Light at Sandover, which gathered two decades of the couple's Ouija board sessions and included voices Merrill and Jackson believed belonged to figures including W. H. Auden speaking from beyond death. Merrill spent much of his life dividing his time between Stonington, Connecticut, and Athens, Greece, with Jackson, and Divine Comedies is now generally read as the hinge in his career, the book where his gift for polished lyric first opened onto the far stranger, more ambitious project that would occupy the rest of his writing life.