Langdon Hammer on James Merrill ("Christmas Tree")

Close Readings

Our own Very Special Christmas Episode: Langdon Hammer joins the podcast to talk about James Merrill's "Christmas Tree."

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015). With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). He is also the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, 1993) and the editor of Library of America editions of Crane and May Swenson. He is poetry editor at The American Scholar and a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find a free, online version of "Modern Poetry," one of his Yale University undergraduate lecture courses, here.

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