James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; and his ability to write books that were not just collected poems, but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole. This title argues that the ""Nekyia"" confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill's poetry.

In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill's poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill's work - not just in "The Changing Light at Sandover," where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet's books, before and after that central text.