(1926–1995)
U.S. Pulitzer prize winning poet
James Merrill
The day is breaking someone else’s heart.
“Prism,” in James Merrill: Selected Poems 1946–1985 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 65.
A lot of metaphor must be in the beholder’s eye. My kind of mind is so used to “seeing double” that it finds unwelcome subtexts in an instruction manual…A psychiatrist friend calls the creative temperament Janusian—after Janus, whose nature is to look both ways.
“James Merrill,” interviewed by Thomas Bolt, BOMB magazine, Issue 36, Summer 1991.