James Merrill's ouija board

 James Merrill started using a Ouija board in 1953, promptly encountering an engineer “who’d met Goethe”; but the board lit up in the summer of 1955 when JM and DJ contacted a spirit called Ephraim, “A Greek Jew/Born AD 8 at XANTHOS” who was killed on Capri, “throttled/By the imperial guard,” for having been a lover of Caligula. Ensuing adventures in the other world led to “The Book of Ephraim” in 1976, now the first section of Sandover, where one meets Auden and Jane Austen as well as Plato, Alice B. Toklas, God Biology, the angel Michael, and the Architect of Ephesus, to name only a few. Merrill has said of his oracular method, “if it’s still yourself you’re drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more farseeing than the one you thought you knew. Of course there are disciplines with grander pedigrees and similar goals. The board happens to be ours.” And ours: whether Merrill’s other world is beyond or within is left up to the reader, who may find the Ouija board, which consists of no more than 26 capital letters, zero, nine digits, and the words YES or NO, to be the perfect metaphor for language. In any case, the poem is a singular success: in A History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins calls Merrill “one of the most moving, imaginative, and ambitious of living poets,” and says of Sandover, (excepting works by Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound) “no other long poem written by any American since Whitman can be ranked above Merrill’s.