WITH THE PUBLICATION of his Collected Poems, the bulk of James Merrill's verse is now available in two volumes. The first of these, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), with its cobalt cover and chiseled roman letters, looks like The Good Book itself, wearing its merits and ambitions, so to speak, on its sleeve. The poem is an epic couched in a conversation at the Ouija board, and some readers found its 500-odd pages a mere "maze of inner logic, dogma, dates" -- as Merrill once quipped of Yeats's attempt to crack the cosmic code in A Vision. The Collected Poems, for all its heft (736 pages), is a more inviting book. Merrill himself peeks at us, a geisha half hidden by her fusuma, from the edge of the cover. Inside, too, we have him half-smiling in a photograph. And at the heart of Merrill's appeal as a poet, more easily felt in these lyrics than in his epic, is a promise of intimacy.

Merrill's greatest subject was himself, and he wrote revealingly about his absentee father, his parents' divorce, and his homosexual romances. In a mediascape that caters to the aggrieved and sinful -- and which still includes, however grudgingly, a few poets -- it is easy to take these privacies for something they are not, and call Merrill a confessional poet. In "Domestic Architecture," a previously uncollected poem that appears here, Merrill glances at his own connivance in these tabloid matters, while commenting on "Another White House scandal":

It's our democratic
Need to Come Clean, unfurling above the latest
Infrastructure framed by the mad elitist
To keep his realm secure and his facts hermetic

-- As I well know.

But absolute candor and sneaky elitism both share an arrogance Merrill wanted to avoid: The confessional poem does not invite the ear, it assumes an audience; and the Parnassian stanza is careful to aim over our heads. Merrill's accomplishment was to craft a conversational English (his poems are peppered with exclamation marks and parentheses) which he then raised to the second power.

Part of the interest of The Collected Poems is to see how Merrill arrived at this tone, at once demotic and refined. A previous Selected Poems, chosen by Merrill himself, skimped on his earlier work while including the latter volumes almost in full. Now it becomes possible to see how many of Merrill's keywords (bear, mild, fluent, home) were first grooved. On the other hand, in poems like "Foliage of Vision" ("I wept / To hear the insect wrath and rhythm of time") and "Periwinkles" ("Whose cousins, shingled by the finding tide, / Purpled the cloths of kings"), there is an oratorical, impersonal voice, intriguingly undeveloped in the later poetry. Many of these early poems are still lifes, or bestiaries in the manner of Moore. Significance is teased from old tropes ("HourGlass" ends: "Love only is replenishment of halves"), and the natural world is intently observed. This too is very different from Merrill's later verse, so full of people, with its Jamesian atmospheres and subtle psychology.

The human crowd that descends upon Merrill's mature work makes one occasionally wish, while reading through The Collected Poems, for an editor's annotations, brief CVs of the dramatis personae. Indeed, Merrill's poems are seemingly so open, so eager to address the reader as a confidant, that one feels oddly entitled to know exactly who his friends are, and what he really thinks of them. But annotations wouldn't help -- even the frankest poets don't exist, for us, beyond their poems -- and would arguably have violated the spirit of Merrill's contract with his readers. In "Words for Maria," Merrill calls his friend Maria Mitsotáki "the muse / of my off-days." That a poet has off-days (and that he even has a muse for them) is a gentle reminder about the limits of knowledge -- our knowledge as readers -- and the limits of any intimacy. Merrill proposes another, more welcoming, metaphor for understanding these limits in "A Tenancy":

If I am host at last
It is of little more than my own past.
May others be at home in it.

In his poetry, Merrill has all the qualities of a consummate host: He is funny, wise, attentive, perhaps even a little sorry to see you go. With this new collection, his house is made more capacious.