W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and literary translator. Merwin’s antiestablishment political views, along with the radical stylistic shifts in his poetry, have invited controversy throughout his career. He received the National Book Award for poetry in 2005.

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His earliest poems, unpublished works written during his studies at Princeton University, New Jersey, were bleak reflections on the deaths of classmates during World War II (1939-1945). Merwin graduated from Princeton in 1948 and worked in Europe as a literary translator from 1949 to 1951. His first published books of poems, A Mask for Janus and The Dancing Bears (1954), were formally elegant, influenced by his work translating medieval poetry.

During the late 1950s, Merwin began to write about ecological issues. He advocated disarmament and opposed the Vietnam War during the 1960s. In 1963 Merwin abruptly changed the style of his poetry, simplifying his verse, abandoning punctuation, and focusing on post-apocalyptic imagery and themes. He developed this controversial, stripped-down style in several collections of poetry, including The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970; Pulitzer Prize, 1971), and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973).

Merwin’s poetry became more optimistic during the 1970s, expressing faith in nature’s apparent indifference to humanity. Merwin devoted more time to prose, writing collections of mythic parables such as The Miner's Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977). He also wrote autobiographical stories in Unframed Originals (1982) and Regions of Memory (1987). In the 1980s Merwin attempted to block land development and advocated the rights of indigenous people in Hawaii. He settled on the island of Maui, planting a miniature forest of endangered trees and growing most of his food himself.

Merwin has received numerous awards over his long career. In 1994 the Academy of American Poets named him the first winner of the Tanning Prize, an annual award to honor poets 'of outstanding and proven mastery.' Other honors have included the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and a Ford Foundation Governor’s Award for Literature. Some of his other works include The Rain in the Trees (1988), Travels (1993), The Vixen (1996), The Folding Cliffs (1998), The River Sound (1999), and The Pupil (2001), and the essay collection The Ends of the Earth (2004).

In 2005 Merwin published the poetry collections Migration and Present Company as well as the memoir Summer Doorways. Migration, which includes poems taken from many of his previous collections, won the prestigious National Book Award. See also American Literature: Poetry.