Life & Wisdom Quote by James Merrill

There is a sly practicality tucked inside Merrill's offhand sentence, the kind of modesty that doubles as a flex. "Before trying a novel" frames the novel not as destiny but as a genre you audition for, like a role you might or might not fit. Then comes the quiet pivot: he didn't start with short stories, the usual training wheels; he started with plays, the form most allergic to authorial control. A poet choosing theater first is a revealing self-imposed constraint. Onstage, language has to survive bodies, timing, breath, audience impatience. You can be lyrical, but you can't hide behind lyricism.

The subtext is craft over mystique. Merrill, a poet often associated with polish and high style, is signaling apprenticeship: he tested his ear in a public, collaborative arena before attempting the private sprawl of a novel. It's also a way of narrating ambition without declaring it. "A couple" minimizes; "trying" hedges. The sentence performs a cultivated understatement that keeps ego at arm's length while still asserting range.

Context matters: mid-century American letters treated the novel as the prestige summit and poetry as either rarified or marginal. Merrill's line acknowledges that hierarchy even as it sidesteps it. By presenting genre as sequence, not identity, he resists the idea that a poet should "stay in his lane". The intent isn't to rank forms; it's to show how one form trains the muscles for another: dialogue, scene, the pressure of an audience. It's a career path described like a casual errand, which is exactly how confidence often sounds.