Anticipation and Melancholy in Merrill's 'Christmas Tree'

Today’s selection is an ideal poem for Advent–a bittersweet shape poem that expresses the “hopes and fears of all the years.”

Poet and critic John Hollander wrote of Merrill that he “was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious.”

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