ABSTRACT
YEATS DOES NOT FIGURE IN ANY OF THE POEMS FOLLOWING SANDOVER THAT draw on dictations from the Ouija board: not “From the Cutting Room Floor,” “The Plato Club,” or “Nine Lives.” Nor is he mentioned or directly quoted in any of the later poems. Nonetheless, evidence of Merrill’s continued engagement with Yeats persists. Occasionally Yeatsian echoes surface as little more than rhetorical tags, pieces of wit, or tokens of affinity. Yet at other times (and sometimes within the same poem), we see continuations of Merrill’s “inner-quarrel” with Yeats, or with those aspects of himself represented by Yeats that he can neither wholly accept nor reject. The work following Sandover further refines Merrill’s confident mastery of the Yeatsian idiom even as he more and more subsumes it into his own. What once haunted him has become a cherished inner voice and a resource with which to look back on a life lived and forward, “colder and wiser,” into “the grave dissolving into dawn” (“An Upward Look”).
