Are James Merrill and James Joyce both American poets?
James Merrill James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1977) for "Divine Comedies" (1976). His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled "The Changing Light at Sandover" (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays. He also made a cameo in the 1992 film "Lorenzo's Oil" in a symposium scene where he played a questioning doctor, due to filmmakers wanting to emphasize the "everyman" storyline.
Joycean A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of James Joyce, particularly "Ulysses" or "Finnegans Wake". Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of stream of consciousness. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic, employing multiple technical shifts as a form of thematic or subject development. In this latter respect, it is not merely an opaque or evident technique, such as is characteristic of avant garde prose, but technical shifts that are meant to be recognized by the reader and considered as part of the narrative itself. More than anything, however, Joycean has come to denote a form of extreme verbal inventiveness which tends to push the English language towards multi-lingual polysemy or impenetrability. Joycean word play frequently seeks to imply linguistic and literary history on a single plane of communication. It therefore denies readers the simple denotative message traditional in prose in favor of the ambiguity and equivocal signification of poetry.