James Merrill: Secretly New York School?

At Locus Solus Andrew Epstein reveals James Merrill's rather unexpected connection to the New York School. Although Merrill "operated at some distance from the avant-garde of his day," his ties to that world include Tibor de Nagy gallery and the Artists' Theatre. From Locus Solus:

James Merrill is not often mentioned in the same breath as poets of the New York School. He is usually viewed as a consummate formalist and genteel New England poet, celebrated for his elegant style, refinement, and restraint, who operated at some distance from the avant-garde of his day.

It has therefore been easy to overlook the fact that Merrill actually spent the formative, early years of his career very much in the midst of the New York art and poetry world of the 1950s and 1960s and had significant ties to the poets and painters of the New York School.

Fortunately, the massive new biography of Merrill by Langdon Hammer called James Merrill: Life and Art — which has been receiving favorable reviews in places like the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Times Book Review — chronicles this important chapter of Merrill’s career.

As Hammer notes, Merrill’s first contact with the world of New York poets and artists in the 1950s came through John Bernard Myers, the eccentric co-founder of both the Tibor de Nagy gallery (home to many of the younger New York painters) and the Artists’ Theatre, with director Herbert Machiz. The Artists’ Theatre staged Merrill’s play The Bait in 1953 alongside plays by John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. [...]

Continue reading at Locus Solus.