Out of the life lived

It’s rude to read other people’s mail. But James Merrill preserved copies of his letters and made sure readers could find them, years later, in archives. Now a generous selection lies at our fingertips in A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, edited by Merrill’s biographer Langdon Hammer and Merrill’s close friend the poet and scholar Stephen Yenser.1 And what a treasure it is. Merrill’s correspondence would be of interest, in any case, as documents in twentieth-century American poetry, but these missives have the flash and delight of independent literary creations and read almost like a novel, tracking the inner life and plentifully populated...