A short life of the author
W.S. Merwin (30 September 1927 – 15 March 2019) was an American poet, translator, and environmental activist whose career spanned more than sixty years and traced one of the most remarkable stylistic evolutions in American poetry. He began as a formalist of extraordinary technical skill, became a radical innovator who stripped his poetry of punctuation, abandoned traditional forms, and wrote poems of devastating ecological and political urgency, and ended as a meditative poet of memory, loss, and the natural world whose late work achieved a luminous simplicity. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice — for The Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) — and served as United States Poet Laureate in 2010–2011.
Life and Career
William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Merwin later recalled that his first experience of the power of language came from hearing hymns and scripture in church. He attended Princeton, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur, and after graduating in 1948 lived in Europe for much of the next two decades — in Majorca (where he tutored Robert Graves’s son), in London, in the south of France.
A Mask for Janus (1952) — selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize — was a dazzling debut in the neo-formalist style of the era: mythological subjects, dense textures, elaborate stanzas. Subsequent collections — The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) — moved steadily toward a plainer, more direct style.
The transformation was complete in The Moving Target (1963) and The Lice (1967). These books — written without punctuation, in short, declarative lines that float on the page without the anchoring of commas or periods — are among the most radical achievements in American poetry. The Lice in particular — written during the Vietnam War — is a book of ecological and political desolation: poems about extinction, the destruction of the natural world, the complicity of silence, and the failure of language itself. “For a Coming Extinction” (addressed to the gray whale) and “The Last One” (an apocalyptic parable) are masterpieces of the mode.
The Carrier of Ladders (1970) won his first Pulitzer Prize. Merwin donated the prize money to antiwar causes, writing: “I am not able to accept this prize in good conscience as long as the brutality of the war continues.”
Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), The Rain in the Trees (1988), Travels (1993), The Vixen (1996) — Merwin’s poetry grew warmer and more autobiographical without losing its formal discipline. The poems retained their lack of punctuation (which had become his signature) but developed a longer, more flowing line and a greater emotional openness.
Hawai’i and Environmental Activism
In 1976 Merwin moved to Maui, Hawai’i, where he spent the rest of his life on a former pineapple plantation that he restored to a palm forest — planting hundreds of species of palms and creating what became the Merwin Conservancy, dedicated to the preservation of biodiversity and the cultivation of poetry. The Maui years were enormously productive: his engagement with the Hawaiian landscape, with Buddhism (he had practiced Zen since the 1960s), and with the ecological fragility of island ecosystems deepened his poetry’s preoccupation with impermanence and interconnection.
The Shadow of Sirius (2008), his second Pulitzer winner, is a collection of memory poems — looking back across a long life with clarity, gratitude, and an acceptance of loss that never tips into resignation. It is his most accessible and emotionally immediate collection.
He was also one of the great translators of the twentieth century. His translations span a remarkable range: medieval Spanish epic (The Poem of the Cid), Provençal troubadour poetry, Dante’s Purgatorio, the poems of Pablo Neruda, Jean Follain, Osip Mandelstam, and numerous other poets. His prose — The Lost Upland (1992, about rural France), Unframed Originals (1982, family memoir), The Miner’s Pale Children (1970, prose poems) — is as accomplished as his verse.
Critical Standing
Merwin is one of the essential American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, alongside Ashbery, Bishop, Rich, and Ammons. His influence on subsequent poets — particularly in the use of unpunctuated free verse — is immense. The Lice is widely considered one of the defining books of the 1960s, and his late work has found a large and devoted readership.
Key Works
- The Lice (1967)
- The Carrier of Ladders (1970)
- The Rain in the Trees (1988)
- The Shadow of Sirius (2008)
- Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005)
Collecting Merwin
A Mask for Janus (1952, Yale University Press) — the Yale Younger Poets debut — brings $100–$300. The Lice (1967, Atheneum) brings $80–$200. The Carrier of Ladders (1970, Atheneum) brings $40–$100. Later collections are widely available. Merwin’s translations and limited-edition broadsides are also collected.