James Ingram Merrill
(March 3, 1926 - February 6, 1995) U.S.A.
Poet
Born in New York, he is the son of the financier Charles Merrill (the co-founder of the Merrill/Lynch stockbroker firm) and his second wife, Helen Ingram.
 After graduation from Lawrenceville School and later from Amherst College (1947) he began his literary career with First Poems (1951), followed by further and increasingly philosophic poetry marked by an elegant and disciplined style in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966, national Book Award), The Fire Screen (1969), Braving the Elements (1972), The Yellow Pages (1974), and Divine Comedies (1976, Pulitzer Price), including the long narrative "Book of Ephraim".
Merrill won a Bollingen Prize in 1973. He has also written prose plays, The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960), and novels, The Seraglio (1957), and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965). He was a winner of 2 National Book Awards and a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.
He was never secretive about his homosexuality, which is both a persistent theme in his writings, and was said by him to have fuelled his work. His lover was David Jackson, a married man. From 1979 Merrill divided his time between Stonington and Key West, where his lover David Jackson had a house.
Where I hid my face, your touch, quick merciful,
Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
(From: Days of 1964)
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