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W. S. Merwin

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William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 - ) is one of the most influential American poets of latter part of the 20th century.

Merwin made a name for himself as an anti-war poet during the 1960's. Later, Merwin would evolve toward mythological themes and develop a unique prosidy characterized by indirect narration and the absence of punctuation. In the 80's and 90's, Merwin's interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology would deepen the mystic mythology of his writing. Now in his later years, Merwin continues to write prolifically, though he also dedicates signicant time to the restoration of Hawaiian rainforsts.

Merwin's poetic diction is so unique that a W.S. Merwin poem is considered almost immediately recognizable, one of the highest compliments a poet can receive. Over the years, he has received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize and a Tanner Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets.

Contents

Life

Merwin was born on September 30, 1927 in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Princeton University in 1948. His father was a Presbyterian minister. 'I started writing hymns for my father as soon as I could write at all', Merwin has said. While at Princeton, he studied writing with John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur, to whom his fifth book, The Moving Target (1963), was later dedicated. Merwin spent a postgraduate year at Princeton studying Romance languages, an interest that would lead, eventually, to his much-admired work as a translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.

Merwin travelled in France, Spain, and England. He settled in Majorca in 1950 as a tutor to Robert Graves's son. Graves, with his interest in mythology, would become a primary influence on young Merwin. Moving to London in 1951, Merwin made his living as a translator for several years. In America, his first book of poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for 1952, selected by W. H. Auden, who remarked in his introduction on the young poet's technical virtuosity. That volume, A Mask for Janus, is immensely formal, neoclassical in style. For the next decade Merwin would regularly publish collections of intensely wrought, brightly imagistic poems that recalled the poetry of Wallace Stevens as well as Robert Graves and other influences. He lives in Haiku, Hawaii.

At a Union City council meeting in early March 2006, historian Kathie Pontus formally requested that the city of Union City honor Merwin, who is scheduled to be in New Jersey to accept the National Book Award for his latest poetry collection, [Migration]. Pontus asked the board that a street naming be held on April 22 for Merwin. Merwin, who was contacted for the event, stated that he was "nostalgic about Union City, and moved that it remembered him, and would love to return home to receive this honor."

Works

In 1952 Merwin's first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. W.H. Auden selected the work for that distinction. Later, in 1971 Auden and Merwin would exchange harsh words in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Merwin had published a feature, [On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize] in the June 3, 1971 issue of The New York Review of Books that announced his objection to the Vietnam War and that he was donating his prize money. Auden responded in a letter entitled [Saying No] that appeared in the July 1, 1971 issue stating that the Pulitzer Prize jury was not a political body with any ties to the American foreign policy.

From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works) he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Italian and Latin poetry, including Dante's Purgatorio. Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiian history and legend.

Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of William Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic.

In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) (which won a Pulitzer Prize) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes.

In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal. Migration won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry.

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Translations

Other sources

The Union City Reporter March 12, 2006.

External links

 

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