Langdon Hammer

I study the history of poetry, primarily but not only American and British. I’m concerned with literary biography and literary theory.  I’m an archival scholar and a close reader. I edit texts. I read letters and diaries. I look at the poem on the page (or screen) and I listen to it in the ear (which involves acoustics, but also what Robert Frost called “the imagining ear”).  My subject is poetics, of all kinds.  I agree with Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

My James Merrill: Life and Art was published by Knopf in 2015. The book was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize and won the Lambda literary award for gay biography. My work on it was supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2003-04) and the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2012-13) and residences at the James Merrill House (2008) and the Bogliasco Foundation (2009). For reviews and more about the biography, click on my CV or the book’s website.

While writing that book, I edited two books for Library of America: The Collected Poems of May Swenson (2013) and Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters (2006).  My work on Crane began with a book of literary history, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism, published by Princeton in 1993.  That book was the subject of a review essay in Modernism/modernity and named a “Breakthrough Book” by Lingua Franca.  In a sequel to it, I introduced and edited a collection of Crane’s letters called O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997). 

A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, which I edited and annotated with Stephen Yenser, was published by Knopf in 2021 and reviewed in the Wall Street Journal; New Criterion; New York Times Book Review; Times Literary Supplement;  New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Since 2004, I’ve been poetry editor of The American Scholar, where I’ve published short essays introducing more than seventy-five poets, including Ange Mlinko, Catherine Barnett, Rae Armantrout, Wong May, Terrance Hayes, Srikanth Reddy, A. E. Stallings, Louise Glück, Valerie Martinez, Major Jackson, Robin Robertson, Angie Estes, Kevin Young, Christian Wiman, John Koethe, John Ashbery, Eavan Boland, Maureen N. McLane, Gary Snyder, Rosanna Warren, Henri Cole, Kay Ryan, Carl Phillips, Heather McHugh, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Andrew Motion, Frank Bidart, Michael Longley, Thylias Moss, Mary Jo Salter, Paul Muldoon, Charles Wright, and Charles Simic (https://theamericanscholar.org/).

I joined the Yale English Department faculty in 1987.  I served three terms as Department Chair, 2005-08, 2014-17, and 2017-19. 

Selected Publications

- Grandfather’s Bible, New York Review of Books online, co-published in print as Grandfather’s Bible: Elizabeth Bishop, the Baptist Church, and Nova Scotia in Revel (2025)       

- Plath’s German, English Literary History (ELH) 91 (2024)

- The Kingdom of Ends [on Reginald Shepherd], New York Review of Books (2024)

- The Century, The Yale Review online (2022)

- Shadows Walking: With Wallace Stevens in New Haven in Los Angeles Review of Books (2021)

- The Art of Losing [on The Dolphin Letters: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle], New York Review of Books (2019)

- Still to Love: For J. D. McClatchy, The Yale Review (2019)

- Lyric, the Virtual Poem, and Wallace Stevens, The Wallace Stevens Journal (2019)

- Inside and Underneath Words [on Susan Howe] in New York Review of Books (2017)

- Voice and Erasure in Srikanth Reddy’s ‘Voyager’ in The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time (2017)

- Lost at Sea: Jasper Johns with Hart Crane, Yale Review (2009)

- Plath’s Lives, Representations (2001)

Works in Progress

I am writing a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop for Farrar Straus and Giroux.

I’ve also been writing personal essays about poet-friends, a bout of illness, my many years in New Haven, and other topics. Let’s see if I can turn them into a book.    

Courses

My undergraduate courses include English 1026 and 1027, junior and senior seminars on Lyric Theory, The Life of the Author, Elizabeth Bishop, and three seminars for Yale-in-London. This year I’m teaching a course called Word and Image from William Blake to Claudia Rankine that will bring students to the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Beinecke Library.

I have taught many lecture courses, including Contemporary American Literature and Poetry Since 1950.  My Modern Poetry lectures were recorded in 2007 as a pilot course in Yale’s Open Access Video Project. The course has had many hundreds of thousands of views and was featured in the New York Times (2008) and Chronicle of Higher Education (2012).

I like team-teaching. Meghan O’Rourke and I taught a workshop on Public Criticism for advanced graduate students. Ardis Butterfield and I have twice taught The History and Theory of the Lyric, Medieval and Modern. George Syrimis and I taught a seminar on Modern Literature and the Levant. And last year Daniel Swain and I taught Poetry and the City: The New York School Poets.

I’ve supervised the dissertations of more than thirty-five PhD students, many of whom have turned their dissertations into important books, and all of whom have built impressive careers in the academy or outside it.  In 2011, I won Yale’s Graduate Student Mentor Award in the Humanities.

I’ve also led seminars on poetry for public school teachers in the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute and Yale New Haven Teachers Institute National Initiative and taught courses for the Bread Loaf School of English in Santa Fe, which awarded me the Robert Frost Chair for teaching excellence.

http://www.jamesmerrillweb.com/

updated August 2025