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 outer life of a charismatic, original poet whose work is likely to leave a permanent imprint on poetry in English.

In one of Merrill’s earliest poems, “The Black Swan,” the title poem of his 1946 chapbook and the lead poem of his first “real” collection, First Poems (1951), the swan knows how to “Transform, in time, time’s damage.” Merrill’s themes remained consistent through a lifetime’s metamorphoses of style. The same faith in transformation drives “Processional,” the final poem in The Inner Room (1988), his penultimate collection. A tightly plotted sonnet, “Processional” follows the transformations of droplet to snowflake to “birdglance,” of organic muck to coal, and in the couplet, “Or in three lucky strokes of word golf lead/ Once again turns (load, goad) to gold.” To read his letters is to trace transformation: familial strife,