W S Merwin

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Merwin, W[illiam] S[tanley] (1927– ),New York‐born poet, after graduation from Princeton (1948) and further study of Romance languages began his career with A Mask for Janus (1952), issued in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This collection has been followed by others, including The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970, Pulitzer Prize), Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973), and The Compass Flower (1977), in which his poetry has moved from the relatively formal and traditional early work to poems that are intense and existential. In 1979 he was awarded a Bollingen Prize for his poetry, continued in Finding the Islands (1982), Opening the Hand (1983), The Rain in the Trees (1987), Selected Poems (1987), and Travels (1993)—a series of portraits and dramatic monologues dealing with Rimbaud in Africa and various naturalists, including William Bartram, and two Native American artists. Recent poetry collections are The Vixen (1996), Flower and Hand: Poems 1977–1983 (1997), The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative (1998), and The River Sound (1999). The volumes The Miner's Pale Children (1970), Houses and Travellers (1977), Unframed Originals (1982), and Regions of Memory (1987) are gatherings of prose, including some stories, memories of friends and family, and critical commentary. Another prose work, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwest France appeared in 1992. Darkling Child (1956), Favor Island (1957), and The Gilded West (1961) are plays, the first written with Dido Milroy. He has also made translations, including Poem of the Cid (1959), The Satires of Perseus (1961), and The Song of Roland (1963).

W. S. Merwin (William Stanley Merwin), 1927–, American poet and translator, b. New York City. After graduating from Princeton in 1948, he traveled in Europe, working as a tutor and studying romance languages, a period described many years later in his memoir Summer Doorways (2005). He has lived in Hawaii since 1976. Merwin is noted for his restrained, spare, sometimes remote, often elegiac, and always finely wrought verse. His poetry frequently focuses on nature and the human response to it as well as on memory and mortality. It embodies a contemplative engagement with myth and religious vision and often expresses an overwhelming sense of loss. His many volumes of poetry include A Mask for Janus (1952), The Moving Target (1963), Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970; Pulitzer Prize), Opening the Hand (1983), Selected Poems (1988), Travels (1993), The River Sound (1999), The Pupil (2002), and The Shadow of Sirius (2009; Pulitzer Prize). Merwin is also well known for his translations, among them The Cid (1959) and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1962). He was named poet laureate of the United States in 2010.

Bibliography: See his memoir of childhood, Unframed Originals (1982, repr. 1994, 2005); studies by C. Davis (1981), M. Christhif (1986), C. Nelson and E. Folsom, ed. (1987), E. J. Brunner (1991), H. L. Hix (1997), J. Frazier (1999), and H. Bloom, ed. (2004).