W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin (1927-). Photo by Bernard Tardien. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

W.S. Merwin
Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Born	September 30, 1927 (1927-09-30) New York City
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American
Education	Wyoming Seminary, Kingston, PA 1944
Alma mater	Princeton University
Period	1952–2019
Genres	Poetry, prose, translation
Notable award(s)	PEN Translation Prize (1969) Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1971, 2009) Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1994) Tanning Prize (1994) United States Poet Laureate (2010)
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Jeanne Ferry Dido Milroy Paula Schwartz (1983–present)
Influences John Berryman William Blake Robert Graves Ezra Pound Francois Villon

William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 - March 15, 2019) was an American poet who wrote over 50 books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation.

Life

Youth

Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He grew up on the corner of Fourth Street and New York Avenue in Union City, New Jersey until 1936, when his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. As a child, he was enamored of the natural world, sometimes finding himself talking to the large tree in his back yard. He was also fascinated with things that he saw as links to the past, such as the building behind his home that had once been a barn that housed a horse and carriage. At the age of five he started writing out hymns for his father.

After attending Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School in Northeast Pennsylvania, Merwin won a scholarship to attend Princeton University where he studied under R.P. Blackmur, and was influenced by John Berryman.

Career

After college, Merwin married Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and moved to Majorca to tutor Robert Graves's son. There, he met Dido Milroy — 15 years older than he — with whom he collaborated on a play and whom he later married and lived with in London. In 1956, Merwin moved to Boston for a fellowship at the Poets' Theater.

In 1952 Merwin's debut 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 "On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize" in the June 3, 1971, issue of the Review, outlining his objections to the Vietnam War and stating that he was donating his prize money to the draft resistance movement.

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.

He returned to London where he was friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

In 1968, Merwin moved to New York City, separating from his wife who stayed at their home in France. He lived in a small apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village, and began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity.

In the late 1970s, Merwin moved to Hawaii and eventually was divorced from Dido Milroy. He married Paula Schwartz in 1983.

Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over 15 volumes of his works), he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Latin and Italian poetry (including Dante's Purgatorio) as well as poetry from Sanskrit, Yiddish, Middle English, Japanese and Quechua. He also served as selector of poems of the late American poet Craig Arnold (1967–2009).

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 Hawai`i in history and legend.

Migration (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A life-long friend of James Wright, Merwin wrote an elegy to him that appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in memory of James Wright.

The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

In June 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the 17th United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.

Final years

Merwin lived a quiet life on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the northeast coast of Maui, Hawaii. where he was dedicated to the restoration of the island's tropical rainforests.

Merwin died on March 15, 2019, in his sleep at his home, as reported by his publisher Copper Canyon Press.

Writing

Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of his 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 — 'Odysseus' — reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic.

During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. 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) 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 the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. In Merwin's later volumes — such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988) — he transforms 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.

Recognition

Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, 1 of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.

Merwin's former home town of Union City, New Jersey, honored him in 2006 by renaming a local street near his former home W.S. Merwin Way.

Awards

W.S. Merwin Way, Union City, NJ. Photo © Luigi Novi. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

• 1952: Yale Younger Poets Prize for A Mask for Janus
• 1954:Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry
• 1956: Rockefeller Fellowship
• 1957: National Institute of Arts and Letters grant
• 1957: Playwrighting Bursary, Arts Council of Great Britain
• 1961: Rabinowitz Foundation Grant
• 1962: Bess Hokin Prize, Poetry magazine
• 1964/1965: Ford Foundation Grant
• 1966: Chapelbrook Foundation Fellowship
• 1967: Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, Poetry magazine
• 1968: PEN Translation Prize for Selected Translations 1948-1968
• 1969: Rockefeller Foundation Grant
• 1971: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Carrier of Ladders (published in 1971)
• 1973: Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• 1974: Shelley Memorial Award
• 1979: Bollingen Prize for Poetry, Yale University Library
• 1987: Governor's Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii
• 1990: Maurice English Poetry Award
• 1993: Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry.
• 1993: Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Travels.
• 1994: Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award
• 1999: Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a jointly-held position with Rita Dove and Louise Glück
• 2004: Golden Wreath Award of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia
• 2004: Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2005: National Book Award for Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems
• 2009: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008)
• 2010: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement
• 2010: United States Poet Laureate

Publicatons

Poetry

• A Mask for Janus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press *Yale Series of Younger Poets), 1952.
• The Dancing Bears. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954.
• Green with Beasts. New York: Knopf, 1956.
• The Drunk in the Furnace. New York: Macmillan, 1960.
• The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1963.
• Collected Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1966.
• The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
• Animae. San Francisco: Kayak, 1969.
• The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
• Signs (With A.D. Moore). Iowa City, IA: Stone Wall Press, 1970.
• Asian Figures. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
• Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
• The First Four Books of Poems (contains A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, & The Drunk in the Furnace). New York: Atheneum, 1975.
• The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.
• Feathers from the Hill. Iowa City, IA: Windhover, 1978.
• Finding the Islands. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.
• Opening the Hand. New York: Atheneum, 1983.
• The Rain in the Trees: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1988.
• Selected Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
• Travels: Poems. New York: Knopf , 1993.
• The Vixen: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1996.
• Flower and Hand: Poems, 1977-1983. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1996.
• East Window: The Asian poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1998.
• The Folding Cliffs: A narrative (verse novel. New York: Knopf, 1998.
• The River Sound: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1999.
• The Pupil. New York: Knopf, 2001.
• Migration: New and selected poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
• Present Company. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
• The Shadow of Sirius. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

Short fiction

• The Miner's Pale Children. New York: Atheneum, 1970; New York: Holt, 1994.
• Houses and Travellers. New York: Atheneum, 1977; New York: Holt, 1994.
• The Lost Upland: Stories of southwestern France. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Non-fiction

• Unframed Originals: Recollections. New York: Atheneum, 1982.
• The Mays of Ventadorn. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002.
• The Ends of the Earth (essays). Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

Translated

• Lope de Rueda, "Eufemia," Tulane Drama Review, December, 1958.
• Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, Punishment without Vengeance, 1958.
• The Poem of the Cid. London: Dent, 1959; New York: New American Library, 1962.
• The Satires of Persius. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1961.
• Some Spanish Ballads. London: Abelard, 1961.
  • published in U.S. as Spanish Ballads. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961.
• The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1962.
• Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems (translated with Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and others). New York: New Directions, 1968.
• Jean Follain, Transparence of the World. New York: Atheneum, 1969; Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
• Selected Translations, 1948-1968. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
• S. Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected writings. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
• Antonio Porchia, Voices: Selected writings. Chicago: Follett, 1969; Port Towsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
• Federico García Lorca, "Yerma" and "Blood," 1969.
• Pablo Neruda, Twenty Poems and a Song of Despair. London: Cape, 1969
  • with introduction by Christina García & illustrations by Pablo Picasso), New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
• Pablo Neruda, Selected poems (translated with others). New York: Dell, 1970.
• Osip Mandelstam, Selected poems (translated with Clarence Brown). New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
  • also published as The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.
• Sanskrit Love Poetry (translated with J. Moussaieff Mason). New York: Columbia University Press, 1977
  • also published as Peacock's Egg: Love poems from ancient India. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
• Roberto Juarroz, Vertical Poems. San Francisco: Kayak, 1977.
• Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulius (translated with George E. Dimock, Jr.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Selected Translations, 1968-78. New York: Atheneum, 1979.
• Robert the Devil.Iowa City, IA: Windhover, 1981.
• Four French Plays. New York: Atheneum, 1984.
• From the Spanish Morning. New York: Atheneum, 1984.
• Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio. New York: Knopf, 2000.
• Gawain and the Green Knight: A new verse translation. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Edited

• West Wind: Supplement of American poetry. London: Poetry Book Society, 1961.
• Thomas Wyatt, The Essential Wyatt. New York: Ecco Press, 1989.
• (Compiler) Lament for the Makers: A memorial anthology (compiler). Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Plays produced

• Darkling Child(With Dido Milroy), produced 1956.
• Favor Island, produced at Poets' Theatre, Cambridge, MA, 1957, and on British Broadcasting Corporation Third Programme, 1958.
• The Gilded West, produced at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, England, 1961.

Audio / video

W. S. Merwin reads 'Rain Light'

Poetry Everywhere "Yesterday" by W.S. Merwin

• Merwin's poems have been recorded for the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1994.
• Merwin is a reader, with others, on sound recordings, including Poetry and the American People: Reading, Voice, and Publication in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Library of Congress Bicentennial Symposium, 2000; Poetry in America: Favorite Poems: An Evening of Readings and a Special Favorite Poem Audio and Video Presentation, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 2000; An Evening of Dante in English Translation, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 2000.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

• The Union City Reporter March 12, 2006.

Fonds

Merwin's literary papers are held at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The collection, which is open to researchers, consists of some 5,500 archival items and 450 printed books.

External links

Poems

• W.S. Merwin profile & 7 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• W.S. Merwin b. 1927 at the Poetry Foundation.
• W.S. Merwin--Online Poems, Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• William Stanley Merwin at PoemHunter (32 poems)

Audio

• W.S. Merwin (b. 1927} at The Poetry Archive
• W.S. Merwin at YouTube

Books

• W.S. Merwin at Amazon.com

About

• W.S. Merwin biography at Biography.com
• W.S. Merwin at NNDB.
• Armenti, Peter. W.S. Merwin: Online Resources, Library of Congress, accessed November 25, 2010.
• W.S. Merwin (1927- ) at Modern American Poetry.
• Edward Hirsch (Spring 1987). "W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2692/the-art-of-poetry-no-38-w-s-merwin. 
• Kubota, Gary T. "Catching Up With Maui's Most Famous Poet: At Home and at Peace In a Tropical Landscape, W.S. Merwin Enriches the Literature of Nature", Honolulu Star-Bulletin, April 21, 2001
• "Mixed Parables", review of Houses and Travellers by Robert Bly
• Norton, Ingrid. "Second Glance: Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one" Open Letters Monthly, accessed November 25, 2010.
• Lerner, Ben. "The Emptiness at the End" Jacket magazine, October 2005