Merwin, W. S.
Merwin, W. S.
(William Stanley Merwin), 1927–2019, 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). From 1976 he lived in Maui, Hawaii, in a mountain forest which he restored. Merwin is noted for his restrained, spare, unpunctuated, 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), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970; Pulitzer Prize), Opening the Hand (1983), Travels (1993), The River Sound (1999), The Pupil (2002), The Shadow of Sirius (2009; Pulitzer Prize), and Garden Time (2016). Merwin is also well known for his translations, among them The Cid (1959) and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1962). He was poet laureatepoet laureate, title conferred in Britain by the monarch on a poet whose duty it is to write commemorative odes and verse. It is an outgrowth of the medieval English custom of having versifiers and minstrels in the king's retinue, and of the later royal patronage of poets, such
..... Click the link for more information. of the United States from 2010 to 2011.
Bibliography
See M. Wiegers, ed., The Essential W. S. Merwin (2017), his memoir of childhood, Unframed Originals (1982); 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).