scholarly journals Canon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Harrison Smith
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

The Critical Introduction, titled "James Merrill's Queer Muse," uses Queer Theory to analyze Merrill's creative process when writing The Changing Light at Sandover. It argues that Merrill queers the heteronormative orientation of the eroticized relationship between poet and muse. This heteronormative dynamic is exemplified by the twentieth-century's most famous poet to draw on occult inspiration, W.B. Yeats. Merrill is both explicit and implicit in rejecting Yeats' assertive, decidedly masculine approach to his presumed female muse, emphasizing the poet's passivity toward and equality with the muse in the creative process. The second part is a collection of poems titled "Canon." Each of the collection's sixty-six poems is written in conversation with a book of the Protestant Bible, and each poem uses only the words found in its corresponding book.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of

Using Cather and Lewis’s shared gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, as a touchstone, the introduction describes how biographers have approached the question of Willa Cather’s sexuality, how critics have applied queer theory to readings of her work, and how Lewis’s place in Cather’s life and creative process has been repeatedly ignored or misrepresented. The introduction lays out the terms on which this volume defines Lewis’s relationship with Cather and makes her visible again: it introduces Lewis’s role as Cather’s editor and suggests how models of the history of sexuality have failed to capture the persistence of the so-called Boston marriage into the twentieth century.

Merrill's the Changing Light at Sandover

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-53
Author(s):  
Evans Lansing Smith
Keyword(s):  
Changing Light ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

“It’s all by someone else!”

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Christopher K. Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century American Literature ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Changing Light At Sandover

James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover is the outstanding visionary long poem of late twentieth-century American literature. Despite its somewhat unusual mode of composition and the rather eccentric heavenly pantheon with which Merrill claims to have communicated, Sandover is presented as the transmission of an authentic prophetic message and the narrative of the manner in which that message was received. One of the more intriguing aspects of the text is its self-reflexive nature. A substantial amount of the poem’s dialogue and a number of narrative manipulations interrogate the technologies of the poem’s composition and the relation of Merrill’s medium and method to his task as the author of a sacred text in a skeptical age. These internal tests ultimately confirm his efforts by celebrating the most basic element of any author’s craft—language—as not only the medium for the message but also the mechanism of humankind’s redemption.

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