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.
Merwin’s A Mask for Janus (1952), a collection of traditional songs, ballads, and carols, earned the approval of W. H. Auden and the Yale University Younger Poets series. The Dancing Bears (1954), a volume rich with fable, probes alienation, as does Green with Beasts (1956), a bestiary, or animal book, expressing lessons learned from animals. More family-oriented is The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), a collection of verse portraits. After an unproductive period, Merwin recaptured his poetic voice for The Moving Target (1963), an experiment in flowing rhetoric that employs a halting line marked by long pauses, but uninhibited by punctuation. A cult favorite, The Lice (1969), predicts the destruction of those who lose their connections with divinity and nature. Composing these harsh poems was so devastating to Merwin that he feared he would never write again. He reclaimed his vision with Animae (1969) and a Pulitzer Prize winner, The Carrier of Ladders (1970), a tribute to history’s role in self-redemption. He refocused on the present in Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), followed by a somber work, The Compass Flower (1977).
After shifting residence to Hawaii in the late 1970s, Merwin took heart in new encounters with seascapes and native culture, as displayed in the adapted haiku of Finding the Islands (1982). Returning to boyhood, he issued Opening the Hand (1983), which preceded another somber work, The Rain in the Trees (1987), and Travels (1993). In addition to anthologies, he published prose stories, essays, and vignettes in The Miner’s Pale Children (1970), Houses and Travelers (1994), and Unframed Originals: Recollections (1994). Winner of the PEN translation prize, he also published Selected Translations: 1948–1968 (1979), as well as translations of the Cid, Sanskrit love verse, medieval epics, and numerous other literary works.
