ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

James Merrill

James Merrill is a very smart man who liked to write poems. He wrote lots of poems about all kinds of things like love, nature, and his own life. He was very good at using words in a way that made people feel things and think about things in a new way.

But James Merrill did something really special. He was one of the first poets to use a special machine called a computer to write his poems. This was a long time ago when computers were really new and exciting. James Merrill liked using the computer because he could move words around and change things easily. It was like playing a puzzle game with words.

Even though James Merrill used a computer to help him write, he was still very good at making his poems sound beautiful. Lots of people liked his poems and thought he was a great poet. He even won lots of awards for his poetry.

So, James Merrill was a smart man who loved writing poems and he used a computer to help him do it. But the really special thing was that he was really good at both writing and using the computer to create something new and beautiful.