W. S. Merwin
From Philosopedia
Merwin, W(illiam) S(tanley) (30 September 1927 - )
Merwin, the son of a Presbyterian father, started writing hymns for his father at a young age. He studied at Princeton with John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur. In a postgraduate year at Princeton, he traveled to Europe and has become a recognized translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.
A poet and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is known for his translation of The Cid (1959) and for such poetry such as A Mask for Janus (1952), Drunk in the Furnace (1960), The Carrier of Ladders (1970, for which he received a Pulitzer award), and The Compass Flower (1977).
Responding to a query about humanism, Merwin wrote:
- "Humanism," tout court, as in your first category, is a term that I would not have made a point of quarrelling with, at one time, if it had been applied to me, though I would never have laid claim to it on my own and have always been uncomfortable with "isms," and that one is no exception. But I have come to have and to recognize further misgivings about the word and what strike me as the assumptions around it, which seem serious enough for me to avoid the use of it insofar as possible, and to feel that I do not at all fit the ascriptions that it implies. What I hear in the word humanist� now is the suggestion of a "devotion to humanity and human interests" exclusively of, or in preference to, or as against any and all other forms of life. At its least it connotes to me a rather smug and stuffy club, content with its membership policy, and at its worst a comfortable platform from which to justify the current proliferation of human fabrication, convenience, and self-importance, at the expense of every non-human living being. What I value most about my own species, what I take to be singular about it, is the craving to see, beyond immediate comfort, advantage, and condition, the nature of life as a whole in each of its forms and in its full mystery, and the ability to recognize itself as a gifted part of that undefinable and unqualifiable totality. I think of that as our true and only place, and I believe that any values we may arrogate to ourselves that do not arise from such a recognition and its sobering demands for proportion and responsibility, are simply egotism writ large, and the great classical humanists� themselves, as well as the events of our age, have made plain enough the consequences of that.
In 1998, he wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, a novel-in-verse about Hawaiian history and legend. Migration won the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry. In 2007, Merwin won the 2006 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his Present Company (2005). The $10,000 prize, donated by the family of Mrs. Bobbitt - a sister of President Lyndon B. Johnson - is awarded every two years and recognizes a book of poetry written by an American and published during that time, or the lifetime achievement of an American poet.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he has had an interest in ecology and Buddhism. Since the 1970s, Merwin has lived in Maui.
In 2009, his The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press) was published, of which Helen Vendler in New York Review of Books, has written:
- All the characteristics of the Audenesque are here: the stanzaic form, the long unwinding sentence, the undefined thing preceded by a definite article ("the cough), the transferred epithet ("diffident music"), the muted apprehension (as "casually" a storm prepares itself), the anthropomorphizing of the landscape ("the relaxed horizons"), the use of personified abstractions ("Ignorance").
- Now, almost a half-century later, we encounter in Merwin's new volume, The Shadow of Sirius, not that ingenious young imitator of Auden, but the poet we have come to know over the last decades - the poet of the punctuationless short poem lacking (after its first line) initial capitals, a poem spoken to nobody within hearing distance, spoken to the air.
On 1 July 2010, Merwin was named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress.
{WAS, 19 May 1989}
