This year also marks the celebration of James Merrill's 100th birthday, and it is read by Langdon Hammer, author of the major biography of the poet, James Merrill, Life and Art, which was published in 2015.

Chronicles of Love and Loss by Helen Vendler, May 11th, 1995.

James Merrill, who died on February 6th of this year, gave his last volume the title A Scattering of Salts.

In such a phrase, there are overtones of tears, savors, and fragrances, yet with a clear implication, too, that these astringent crystals are scattered at intervals in the diffuse and oceanic medium of life.

Merrill, for all the poignancy of his work, was a comic poet in the line of Pope and Byron and Auden.

And from the very beginning of his long career, the poems he published combined in sparkling ways suffering and joy.

The son of the financier Charles E. Merrill of Merrill Lynch, he spent his life after Lawrenceville and Amherst largely on his writing, teaching briefly now and then.