William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin’s unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin’s writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands’ rainforests.

Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009), the National Book Award for Poetry (2005) and the Tanning Prize, one 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. Following his receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009, Merwin is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century.

Early life

W. S. 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 hymns for his father, who was a Presbyterian minister.

Career

After attending Princeton University, Merwin married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and moved to Spain. During his stay there, while visiting the renowned poet Robert Graves at his homestead on the island of Majorca, he served as tutor to Graves’s son. There, he met Dido Milroy—fifteen 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. 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. In the late 1970s, Merwin moved to Hawaii and eventually was divorced from Dido Milroy. He married Paula Schwartz in 1983.

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 “On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize” in the June 3, 1971, issue of The New York Review of Books 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. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen 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 Hawaiʻi in history and legend.

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

In the 1960s, Merwin lived in a small apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and 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) 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. Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A lifelong 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 seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan. He is the subject of the 2014 documentary film Even Though the Whole World Is Burning. Merwin appeared in the PBS documentary “The Buddha,” released in 2010. He had moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitkin in 1976.

Personal life

Today, Merwin lives on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the northeast coast of Maui.

Awards

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" or "[year] in literature" article:
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
1969: 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: The Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry
1993: Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Travels
1994: Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award
1998: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded by The Poetry Foundation
1999: Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a jointly-held position with Rita Dove and Louise Glück
2005: National Book Award for Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems
2004: Golden Wreath Award of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia
2004: Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
2008: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement
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
2013: The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award

Other accolades

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.

Bibliography

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" or "[year] in literature" article:

Poetry - collections

* 1952: A Mask for Janus, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press; awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, 1952 (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
1954: The Dancing Bears, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
1956: Green with Beasts, New York: Knopf (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
1960: The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Macmillan (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
1963: The Moving Target, New York: Atheneum
1966: Collected Poems, New York: Atheneum
1967: The Lice, New York: Atheneum
1969: Animae, San Francisco: Kayak
1970: The Carrier of Ladders, New York: Atheneum;—winner of the Pulitzer Prize
1970: Signs, illustrated by A. D. Moore; Iowa City, Iowa: Stone Wall Press
1973: Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, New York: Atheneum
1975: The First Four Books of Poems, containing A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, and The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Atheneum; (reprinted in 2000, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press)
1977: The Compass Flower, New York: Atheneum
1978: Feathers From the Hill, Iowa City, Iowa: Windhover
1982: Finding the Islands, San Francisco: North Point Press
1983: Opening the Hand, New York: Atheneum
1988: The Rain in the Trees, New York: Knopf
1988: Selected Poems, New York: Atheneum
1993: The Second Four Books of Poems, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
1993: Travels: Poems, New York: Knopf winner of the 1993 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
1996: The Vixen: Poems, New York: Knopf
1997: Flower and Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
1998: The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, a “novel-in-verse” New York: Knopf
1999: The River Sound: Poems, New York: Knopf
2001: The Pupil, New York: Knopf
2005: Migration: New and Selected Poems, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press—winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
2005: Present Company, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
2008: The Shadow of Sirius, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press—winner of the Pulitzer Prize
2013: The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin, New York: Library of America
2014: The Moon Before Morning, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press

Poems

Prose

* 1970: The Miner’s Pale Children, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 1994, New York: Holt)
1977: Houses and Travellers, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 1994, New York: Holt)
Regions of Memory
1982: Unframed Originals: Recollections
1992: The Lost Uplands: Stories of Southwest France, New York: Knopf
2002: The Mays of Ventadorn, National Geographic Directions Series; Washington: National Geographic
2004: The Ends of the Earth, essays, Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard
2005: Summer Doorways: A Memoir
2007: The Book of Fables, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press

Plays

* 1956: Darkling Child (with Dido Milroy), produced this year
1957: Favor Island, produced this year at Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts (broadcast in 1958 by Third Programme, British Broadcasting Corporation)
1961: The Gilded West, produced this year at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, England

Translations

* 1959: The Poem of the Cid, London: Dent (American edition, 1962, New York: New American Library)
1960: The Satires of Persius, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press
1961: Some Spanish Ballads, London: Abelard (American edition: Spanish Ballads, 1961, New York: Doubleday Anchor)
1962: The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities, a Spanish novella; New York: Doubleday Anchor
1963: The Song of Roland
1969: Selected Translations, 1948 - 1968, New York: Atheneum; winner of the PEN Translation Prize
1969: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, poems by Pablo Neruda; London: Jonathan Cape (reprinted in 2004 with an introduction by Christina Garcia, New York: Penguin Books)
1969: Products of the Perfected Civilization, Selected Writings of Chamfort, also author of the introduction; New York: Macmillan
1969: Voices: Selected Writings of Antonio Porchia, Chicago: Follett (reprinted in 1988 and 2003, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press)
1969: Transparence of the World, poems by Jean Follain, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 2003, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press)
1971: “Eight Quechua Poems”, The Hudson Review
1973: Asian Figures, New York: Atheneum
1974: Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown), New York: Oxford University Press (reprinted in 2004 as The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, New York: New York Review of Books)
1977: Sanskrit Love Poetry (with J. Moussaieff Masson), New York: Columbia University Press (published in 1981 as Peacock’s Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India, San Francisco: North Point Press)
1977: Vertical Poetry, poems by Roberto Juarroz; San Francisco: Kayak (reprinted in 1988; San Francisco: North Point Press)
1978: Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis (with George E. Dimock, Jr.), New York: Oxford University Press
1979: Selected Translations, 1968-1978, New York: Atheneum
1981: Robert the Devil, an anonymous French play; with an introduction by the translator; Iowa City, Iowa: Windhover
1985: Four French Plays, including Robert the Devil; The Rival of His Master and Turcaret by Alain-René Lesage; and The False Confessions by Pierre de Marivaux; New York: Atheneum
1985: From the Spanish Morning, consisting of Spanash Ballads by Lope de Rueda and Eufemia: The Life of Lazarillo de Torres (originally translated in Tulane Drama Review, December 1958); New York: Atheneum
1989: Sun at Midnight, poems by Musō Soseki (with Soiku Shigematsu)
1996: Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines
1998: East Window: The Asian Translations, translated poems from earlier collections, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
2000: Purgatorio from The Divine Comedy of Dante; New York: Knopf
2005: Gawain and the Green Knight, a New Verse Translation, New York: Knopf
2013: Selected Translations, translated poems from 1948 - 2010, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
2013: Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press (with Takako Lento)
2013: Sun At Midnight, poems by Muso Soseki, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press (with Soiku Shigematsu) (updated and reissued)

Editor

* 1961: West Wind: Supplement of American Poetry, London: Poetry Book Society
1996: Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology (compiler), Washington: Counterpoint

Other sources

* The Union City Reporter March 12, 2006.

Archives

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

References

Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin