A mystic symbolist, mythmaker, and master of dense verse, poet William Stanley Merwin concerns himself with America's isolation and rootlessness. Through careful compartmentalization, he reflects on the future by absorbing himself with preliterate people, primal sources, pacifism, pollution, and the themes of fragmentation, loss, and social and moral regression. His writing is never trivial. Elegant and freighted with warning, his verse combines passionate focus, logic, and lyricism in a consistent flow that engages as generously as it stymies and unnerves the unwary.
A New Yorker born September 30, 1927, Merwin grew up in Union City, New Jersey, where he wrote hymns at age five. When his family relocated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, he came to love landscapes not yet strip-mined, fouled, and plundered, a focus of his despairing laments. At age 18, Merwin met a poetic giant, Ezra Pound, whose eccentricity struck him as original and unshakable. The meeting preceded Merwin's own development into a unique seer. Like the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, he began speaking a message terrible and forbidding to his contemporaries.
On scholarship at Princeton, Merwin found what he had been seeking while reading poetry in the library and combing the outlying area for horses to exercise. He completed a B.A. in English at age 20. Poet John Berryman and critic R. P. Blackmur encouraged his early writings. During seven years of residency in Europe, he translated Spanish and French classics for the BBC's London office. In 1956, Merwin settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as playwright in residence at Poet's Theater, issuing Darkling Child (1956), Favor Island (1958), and The Gilded West (1961). He served Nation as poetry editor and, in 1961, edited West Wind: Supplement of American Poetry for the London Poetry Book Society. In the mid-1960s, he was on staff at Roger Planchon's Theatre de la Cité in Lyons, France.
