Our own Very Special Christmas Episode: Langdon Hammer [https://english.yale.edu/people/tenured-and-tenure-track-faculty-professors/langdon-hammer] joins the podcast to talk about James Merrill's "Christmas Tree [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39363]." Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art [http://www.jamesmerrillweb.com/] (Knopf, 2015). With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251165/a-whole-world-by-james-merrill-edited-by-langdon-hammer-and-stephen-yenser/](Knopf, 2021). He is also the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691605838/hart-crane-and-allen-tate] (Princeton, 1993) and the editor of Library of America editions of Crane [https://www.loa.org/books/250-complete-poems-selected-letters] and May Swenson [https://www.loa.org/books/381-collected-poems]. He is poetry editor at The American Scholar [https://theamericanscholar.org/author/langdon-hammer/]and a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books [https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/langdon-hammer/], The Yale Review [https://yalereview.org/author/langdon-hammer], and The Los Angeles Review of Books [https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/langdon-hammer/]. You can find a free, online version of "Modern Poetry," one of his Yale University undergraduate lecture courses, here [https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/126]. Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and sign up for my newsletter [https://kamranjavadizadeh.substack.com/] for more links and to stay up to date on our plans.