Remembering W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) was a prolific, leading American writer whose poetry, translations, and prose won praise and broad readerships over seven decades. He was one of contemporary poetry's great poets of ethical concern and conscience, a poet who helped generations of others to find new ways for poetry to embody anti-war, environmental, and ecological activism. The author of over 30 volumes of poetry, Merwin was published in Poetry magazine over his entire career. Though Merwin won virtually every award available to an American poet and served as U.S. poet laureate twice, he always remained one of the most selfless and generous poets of his time.

His first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Though that first book reflected the formalism of the period, Merwin eventually became known for an indirect and open style that eschewed punctuation. The Lice (1967), which is often read as a response to the Vietnam War, also condemns modern man in apocalyptic and visionary terms.“These are poems not written to an agenda but that create an agenda,” wrote poet and critic Reginald Shepherd, “preserving and recreating the world in passionate words. Merwin was always been concerned with the relationship between morality and aesthetics, weighing both terms equally. His poems speak back to the fallen world not as tracts but as artistic events.” His next book, The Carrier of Ladders (1970), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Merwin donated the prize money to the draft resistance movement, writing an essay for the New York Review of Books that outlined his objections to the Vietnam War.

Merwin, who was a practicing Buddhist as well as a proponent of deep ecology, lived on an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii since the late 1970s. He worked painstakingly to restore this property over the decades to its original rainforest state. Both the rigor of practicing Buddhism and the tropical landscape greatly influenced Merwin’s later style. His next books showed his increasing interest in the natural world. But Merwin’s later poetry doesn’t merely describe the natural world; it also employs an ecopoetics that records and condemns the destruction of nature, from the felling of sacred forests to the extinction of whole species. Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005), which won the National Book Award, exposes Merwin’s evolution as a stylist over half a century but also shows that, as Ben Lerner noted, “Merwin ... is an unwaveringly political poet ...  [he] not only tracks the literal impoverishment of our planet, but he makes it symbolize the impoverishment of our culture’s capacity for symbolization.”

Merwin was once asked what social role a poet plays—if any—in our society. He commented: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? ... We keep expressing our anger and our love, and we hope, hopelessly perhaps, that it will have some effect.”

The following selection of poems, articles, audio recordings, and videos pay tribute to Merwin's remarkable legacy in contemporary letters.