A short life of the author
W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) was one of the most honored and transformative American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. His career moved through at least three distinct phases — formal, apocalyptic, and contemplative — each of which produced major work. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice (1971 for The Carrier of Ladders, 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius), the National Book Award, the Tanning Prize, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2011.
Life and Career
William Stanley Merwin was born on 30 September 1927 in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Merwin attended Princeton, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. After graduation he lived in England, France, Spain, and Portugal, working as a translator (from Spanish, French, Latin, and other languages) and absorbing European literary traditions more deeply than most American poets of his generation.
His early collections — A Mask for Janus (1952, selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets), The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956) — are accomplished formal verse: mythological subjects, measured cadences, Audenesque authority. They established him as a talented traditional poet but gave little indication of what was coming.
The decisive break occurred in the mid-1960s. The Moving Target (1963) abandoned regular meter and began experimenting with open forms. The Lice (1967) completed the revolution: a book of poems without punctuation, written in a spare, oracular voice that seemed to emanate from a landscape after catastrophe — ecological, nuclear, spiritual. The poems in The Lice (“For a Coming Extinction,” “The Last One,” “For the Anniversary of My Death”) are among the most powerful anti-war and environmental poems in the language. The book was a response to Vietnam, to the accelerating destruction of the natural world, and to a more diffuse sense that something essential in human civilization was dying.
The Carrier of Ladders (1970) won the Pulitzer Prize, which Merwin accepted with a public statement of protest against the Vietnam War, donating the prize money to draft resistance.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Merwin moved to Hawaii, where he spent the rest of his life restoring a former pineapple plantation to native palm forest. His poetry became quieter, more contemplative, rooted in the natural world of the Pacific — but the unpunctuated style and the visionary authority remained. The Rain in the Trees (1988), The Vixen (1996), The River Sound (1999), and Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005, National Book Award) consolidated his reputation as one of the essential American poets.
Translations
Merwin was also one of the most important literary translators of his era. His translations of the Poem of the Cid, The Song of Roland, Dante’s Purgatorio, and selected poems of Pablo Neruda, Jean Follain, and Osip Mandelstam are themselves significant works of English-language poetry.
Key Works
- The Lice (1967)
- The Carrier of Ladders (1970)
- The Shadow of Sirius (2008)
- Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005)
Collecting Merwin
A Mask for Janus (Yale University Press, 1952) — his debut, selected by Auden — is the key collectible, bringing $200–$600. The Lice first edition (Atheneum, 1967) is $100–$300. Merwin signed willingly at readings and events throughout his career, and signed copies of most titles are available. Copper Canyon Press editions of his later work are attractive and affordable. His translations, particularly the Purgatorio (Knopf, 2000), are collected separately.