W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin (born September 30, 1927, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 15, 2019, Haiku, Hawaii) American poet and translator known for the spare style of his poetry, in which he expressed his concerns about the alienation of humans from their environment.

After graduating from Princeton University (B.A., 1947), Merwin worked as a tutor in Europe and as a freelance translator. He was playwright in residence at the Poet’s Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1956 to 1957 and poetry editor of The Nation (1962).

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Critical acclaim for Merwin began with his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), which was selected for publication by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. His early poems included both lyrical works and philosophical narratives based on myths and folk tales. His subsequent collections included Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), and The Moving Target (1963). The poems of The Lice (1967) reflect the poet’s despair over human mistreatment of the rest of creation. Merwin won a Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders (1970).

The Compass Flower (1977) and Finding the Islands (1982) diverge into more positive territory, though many critics dismissed the love poems that heralded the change in tone as unsuccessful. The love poems in The Rain in the Trees (1988), however, were lauded as more realistic. Travels (1993) turns to the danger and discovery possible in an alien place, while The River Sound (1999) juxtaposes shorter poems in Merwin’s usual style with longer narrative pieces that experiment with rhyme. Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005), winner of the National Book Award, groups work from his earlier career with new verse to effectively trace the evolution of his style from structured to free-flowing. Merwin explored personal childhood memories as well as such universal themes as mortality in The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which earned a Pulitzer Prize. Much of his oeuvre was published by the Library of America (LOA) as the two-volume The Collected Poems of W.S. Merwin (2013). Merwin was only the second living writer to be so surveyed by the LOA. The Moon Before Morning (2014) contains poems exploring time and the beauty of nature. The poems in Garden Time (2016)—many of which focus on memories—were written as Merwin lost most of his eyesight.

Merwin’s translations, often done in collaboration with others, range from plays of Euripides and Federico García Lorca to the epics The Poem of the Cid and The Song of Roland to ancient and modern works from Chinese, Sanskrit, and Japanese. Translations of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio (2000) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2001) won praise for their skillful adherence to the original language of the works. Selected Translations (2013) sampled widely from that body of work.

Merwin wrote several memoirs, including Summer Doorways (2006), a series of recollections from his youthful days at Princeton and abroad. In his novel-in-verse, The Folding Cliffs (1998), Merwin addressed an abiding interest in Hawaii, his longtime home, using the travails of a wide range of characters to evoke the ravages of colonialism. The poet had purchased a barren former pineapple plantation in Haiku, on Maui, in 1977. He slowly restored the land, using ecologically sustainable methods, and the property eventually hosted nearly 500 species of palm tree. The Merwin Conservancy, founded in 2010, endeavoured to create a database mapping and cataloguing the collection, which received permanent protection from the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust in 2014. Merwin documented his experiences creating and stewarding the collection in the volume What Is a Garden? (2015).

In 1994 he was awarded the first annual Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” From 1999 to 2000 Merwin served—with Rita Dove and Louise Glück—as special poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, which was celebrating its bicentennial. He served as poet laureate from 2010 to 2011. He was the subject of the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning (2014).