Champion of antiwar and environmentalist letters, poet, writer, and translator W.S. Merwin earned acclaim over a decades-long career for poetry evoking loss and absence while focusing on the consequences of humanity’s disconnection from nature. He was born on September 30, 1927, and grew up in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Of his Presbytarian upbringing, Merwin later said that he inherited “an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say.” As a child, Merwin developed a fascination with the natural world—and a concomitant antipathy to cities—qualities that would resurface as central themes in much of his poetry. His initial literary influences were not poets, however, but authors of prose fiction, including Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad, who was, according to Merwin, “one of the first authors who made me want to write.” At the age of 16, he attended Princeton on a scholarship, where he first began reading poetry, guided by the literary critic R.P. Blackmur and the poet John Berryman (then a teaching assistant). At Princeton, said Merwin, he tried “incessantly, and with abiding desperation, to write [poetry].” After graduating in 1948, he remained for an additional year to study the Romance languages, laying the foundations for the many translations he produced throughout his career.
After leaving Princeton, Merwin traveled to Europe, taking employment as a tutor for the continental elite. On a visit to Spain, he met Robert Graves at his home in Majorca, and eventually agreed to tutor the poet’s son. Although they had a tense relationship, Graves’s influence is evident in Merwin’s early work. He debuted with the 1952 collection A Mask For Janus, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged by W.H. Auden. Merwin’s first poems reflect the stylistic formalism predominant at the time, and draw on a vast array of literary-historical influences, including classical myth, biblical tales, oral verse, and Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and medieval epic. Merwin—then working as a translator—next moved to London, where he befriended T.S. Eliot and developed several verse plays.
In 1956, Merwin accepted a fellowship from the Poets’ Theater, in Boston, and became its resident playwright for the next two years, joining a community of poets gathered around Robert Lowell. These new influences, and the experience of once again living in the United States, induced profound thematic and stylistic developments in Merwin’s poetry. Prior to his arrival in Boston, said Merwin, his primary influence had been Ezra Pound and “all the great figures of that generation.” (When he was 18, Merwin had visited Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, the psychiatric hospital where he was imprisoned.) His collections released during and immediately after his time in Boston, particularly The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), display a new engagement with contemporary, American themes—although in a 1986 interview Merwin insisted that “what it is to be an American poet I still don’t know.”
Upon the conclusion of his tenure at the Poets’ Theater, Merwin moved back to London. There, he protested nuclear proliferation in the third Aldermaston March, part of a personal political awakening that would inform his poetry throughout the next decade. In 1963, he released The Moving Target, relaxing and varying his use of meter and discarding most punctuation and capitalization. Merwin attributed these changes to the influence of French and Spanish poetry, and to his interest in evoking speech: “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page,” he later explained. “I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.” During the 1960s and the escalation of the Vietnam War, Merwin became a major figure in antiwar letters. In despair at “what we as a species had done,” he combined antiwar themes with an indictment of environmental carnage in the starkly apocalyptic collection The Lice (1967), one of his most famous and influential books. “These are poems,” wrote poet and critic Reginald Shepherd, “not written to an agenda but that create an agenda.” Merwin’s subsequent collection The Carrier of Ladders won the Pulitzer Prize, and he publicly announced his decision to donate the prize money to the draft resistance movement. This activist mentality remained a constant over the course of his career, despite shifts in subject matter and style. Reflecting on the Vietnam era, Merwin expressed a deep sense of responsibility as a poet, even in the face of hopelessness and uncertainty: “Did the poems do any good? We’ll never know…But the alternative was not to do it at all, and that seemed unthinkable, and it still does.”
In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism, and he remained there for the rest of his life. After purchasing a derelict pineapple plantation on Maui, he spent the next 43 years restoring the land and planting an enormous array of tropical flora, including more than 500 varieties of palm. (In 2014, his garden received permanent protection from the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust.) Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Merwin continued his stylistic experimentation while further exploring environmental themes, incorporating the philosophy of deep ecology into his work—the idea, in his words, that “we are absolutely, intimately connected with every living thing…When we destroy the so-called natural world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves.” In 1998, he released The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, a novel-in-verse delving into Hawaiian history and illustrating the devastation wrought by colonialism.
Over his seven-decade career, Merwin won almost every honor obtainable by an American poet. He was twice named U.S. Poet Laureate (1999-2000 and 2010-2011); his 2005 collection Migration: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award; and he received a second Pulitzer in 2009 for his volume The Shadow of Sirius. Merwin also produced a litany of translations, often collaborating with other scholars to translate poetry from languages as varied as Sanskrit, Yiddish, Japanese, and Quechua. His translations of Dante’s Purgatorio and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight earned particular praise, and he won both the PEN Translation Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
Merwin never considered himself “part of any school or approach or movement”; in the words of poet Dan Chiasson, his work resisted “against the encroachments of decades of literary fads.” Merwin died in 2019, at the age of 91. Later in life he had defined, if not a kind of optimism, a sense of the value of the present, in spite of the brutality and despair that his work conveyed. “We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it,” he said. “Our hope is not a thing in the future; it’s a way of seeing the present.”