Private Life: A New York Review Podcast
Jun 24, 2026 · 52 min · 7 segments
In this episode of *Private Life*, Langdon Hammer reads Helen Vendler’s essay, “Chronicles of Love and Loss,” from the May…
Langdon HammerGuestJarrett EarnestHost
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.
Though he experimented with short plays and with novels, the Seraglio, 1957, and the Dieblos Notebook, 1965, and wrote essays, collected in recitative, 1986, and a memoir, A Different Person, 1993, his reputation rests chiefly on his poetry.
In succession, he published first poems, 1951, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, 1952, 1959 water street 1962 nights and days 1966 the fire screen 1969 braving the elements 1972 Divine Comedies, 1976, Mirabelle Books of Number, 1978, and Scripts for the Pageant, 1980.
The last three, with a coda added, were collected as a trilogy called The Changing Light at Sandover.
Now, with a scattering of salts, 20th century American poetry marks the loss of a radiant and moving voice.
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.
Though he experimented with short plays and with novels, the Seraglio, 1957, and the Dieblos Notebook, 1965, and wrote essays, collected in recitative, 1986, and a memoir, A Different Person, 1993, his reputation rests chiefly on his poetry.
In succession, he published first poems, 1951, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, 1952, 1959 water street 1962 nights and days 1966 the fire screen 1969 braving the elements 1972 Divine Comedies, 1976, Mirabelle Books of Number, 1978, and Scripts for the Pageant, 1980.
The last three, with a coda added, were collected as a trilogy called The Changing Light at Sandover.
Now, with a scattering of salts, 20th century American poetry marks the loss of a radiant and moving voice.
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