W. S. Merwin Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Stanley Merwin was born in 1927 in New York City and grew up in a household shaped by his father's vocation as a Presbyterian minister. From childhood he was drawn to language and rhythm, first by composing hymns for his father's services and then by reading widely on his own. He attended Princeton University, where his curiosity about older literatures and living poetry found mentors. The critic and teacher R. P. Blackmur provided a rigorous grounding in form and reading, and the poet John Berryman, who taught at Princeton for a time, encouraged his early efforts. Those years connected Merwin both to a demanding apprenticeship in craft and to a living network of poets who approached language as a moral and imaginative undertaking.

Apprenticeship and First Books
After Princeton he spent time in Europe, a formative wandering that included a period on Majorca tutoring the son of the British poet and novelist Robert Graves. At Deia, the hillside village where Graves lived, Merwin saw at close hand how a writer's daily habits could sustain a lifelong vocation. His first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series, giving him an early public endorsement from one of the era's central figures. The early poems were often formal and riddling, sometimes touched by myth, and showed a young poet absorbing and testing tradition as he sought his own pitch.

Evolution of Voice and Themes
Across the 1950s and early 1960s, Merwin's poems gradually loosened. Books such as The Moving Target marked a turning toward a sparer syntax and wider range of subjects. By the time of The Lice (1967), composed in the shadow of the Vietnam War and a deepening environmental unease, his voice had stripped away most punctuation. The effect was a continuous, hovering movement of thought and image, in which line breaks carried the weight of hesitation, wonder, and grief. The Carrier of Ladders (1970), which would later be recognized with the Pulitzer Prize, consolidated this transformation. He turned increasingly to matters of memory, extinction, and the fragile textures of daily life. The poems carried an ecological conscience without becoming polemic, and they reflected a sustained engagement with Buddhism and other contemplative traditions that helped guide the tenderness and restraint of his late style.

Translator and Literary Collaborator
Translation for Merwin was not a side pursuit but a second life within language. He translated from several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and the older lyric traditions of the troubadours. With the scholar Clarence Brown he produced influential English versions of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, demonstrating a fidelity to tone and cadence more than to literal word-for-word matches. He also brought into contemporary English the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, revealing his ear for the sinew and shimmer of older English. His engagement with Dante's Purgatorio and with modern European poets widened his reach and subtly reconfigured his own diction, as if each translation taught him another way to listen. These labors linked Merwin to a wider community of editors, scholars, and poets who valued translation as a way of renewing the possibilities of one's native tongue.

Life in Hawaii and Environmental Work
In the late 1970s Merwin settled on Maui, on land that had been scarred by agriculture and neglect. Together with his partner and later wife, Paula, he undertook a decades-long restoration of the property, planting thousands of palms and native species and gradually turning a damaged landscape into a living archive of botanical diversity. Their work grew into a nonprofit conservancy that stewards the site and fosters literary and environmental programs. This reclamation project was not separate from his poetry; it was another form of attention. Books such as The Rain in the Trees and the book-length narrative The Folding Cliffs drew on the cultures, histories, and ecologies of Hawaii, transforming local particulars into lyric meditations on time, loss, and endurance. Paula's patience and practical knowledge were central to the daily work, and visitors to the palm garden often saw in their collaboration a model for how art and stewardship might converge.

Recognition and Public Role
Merwin's steady, prolific work earned many of the highest honors in American letters. He received the Pulitzer Prize twice, first for The Carrier of Ladders and decades later for The Shadow of Sirius, a late collection that considers memory, mortality, and the luminous strangeness of ordinary moments. Migration: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award, affirming both the span and consistency of his achievement. In 2010 he was named U.S. Poet Laureate, a role in which he spoke for poetry's place in civic life while maintaining his characteristic reticence and focus on the work itself. Although he valued literary community and counted other writers among his friends and interlocutors, he preferred the quiet continuities of reading, writing, and tending the land to public debate. Figures such as Auden, Graves, Blackmur, and Berryman, each encountered at different points, remained part of the imaginative company that shaped his vocation.

Later Years and Legacy
In his final decades Merwin continued to publish with undiminished clarity. Late books including The Shadow of Sirius, The Moon Before Morning, and Garden Time distill his lifelong themes: the vanishing of species and languages; the way memory rises unbidden; the humility required by attention; the fleetingness of breath and light. Lines arrive as if overheard, pared to essentials, often without capital letters or commas, inviting the reader to enter the current of perception rather than the grammar of argument. After Paula's death, he remained in the home and garden they had made, surrounded by the palms they had planted and the understory they had nursed into being. He died in 2019 in Haiku, Maui, leaving no single school of followers but exerting a quiet influence on generations of poets and translators. The conservancy that bears his name continues the work he and Paula began, hosting readers, scientists, and students who see in that reclaimed valley an emblem of the relation between language and the living world. His books and translations, his example of lifelong apprenticeship, and the green canopy of his garden stand together as his enduring testament.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by S. Merwin, under the main topics: Wisdom - Deep - Poetry.