"We are asleep with compasses in our hands." -- W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwin (New York City, September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over 30 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) 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.
"Now all my teachers are dead except silence.""Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing."
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 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.
After college, Merwin married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and moved to Majorca to tutor Robert 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 Hawai`i in history and legend.
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.
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 Hawai`i 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 (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 seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.
Merwin's colorful personal life, including his numerous relationships, is chronicled in a 1995 New York Times article. Today, Merwin lives a quiet life on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the northeast coast of Maui.
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; awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971)
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, awarded the National Book Award for Poetry in 2005; Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
2005: Present Company, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press
2008: The Shadow of Sirius, (awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009; Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press)
Poems
" Alba" The New Yorker 84/35 (3 November 2008) : 86
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 Direction Series; Washington: National Geographic
2004: The Ends of the Earth, essays, Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard
2005: Summer Doorways: A Memoir, winner of the National Book Award in 2005
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: 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: 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 Mason), 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 Mus? 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
Editor
1961: West Wind: Supplement of American Poetry, London: Poetry Book Society
1996: Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology (compiler), Washington: Counterpoint
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.
