Background
Born William Stanley Merwin in New York City, United States on September 30, 1927, he was the son of a Presbyterian minister.
( America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel ab...)
America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. ?Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation, writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janus?the moment was, as the author writes, ?an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.
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( Named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The N...)
Named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry Named by O as one of the "20 Books of Poetry Everyone Should Own" ?The poems in Migration speak a life-long belief in the power of words to awaken our drowsy souls and see the world with compassionate interconnection.?National Book Award judges statement ?The publication of W. S. Merwins selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world.?Los Angeles Times W. S. Merwin is the most influential American poet of the last half-century?an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. Migration: New and Selected Poems is that case. This 540-page distillation?selected by Merwin from fifteen diverse volumes?is a gathering of the best poems from a profound body of work, accented by a selection of distinctive new poems. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Merwin was advised by John Berryman to ?get down on your knees and pray to the muse every day. Migration represents the bounty of those prayers. Over the last fifty years, Merwins muse has led him beyond the formal verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. As Adrienne Rich wrote of Merwins work: ?I would be shamelessly jealous of this poetry, if I didnt take so much from it into my own life. W. S. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, prose, and translation. He lives in Hawaii, where he raises endangered palm trees.
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( The Essential W.S. Merwin beautifully demonstrates why...)
The Essential W.S. Merwin beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of Americas most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years.The Washington Post Merwin is one of the great poets of our age.Los Angeles Times Book Review Merwin has become instantly recognizable on the page; he has made for himself that most difficult of all creations, an accomplished style.Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books It is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change.The Nation The Essential W.S. Merwin traces a poetic legacy that has changed the landscape of American letters: seven decades of audacity, rigor, and candor distilled into one definite volume curated to represent the very best works from a vast oeuvre, from his 1952 debut, A Mask for Janus, to 2016s Garden Time. The Essential W.S. Merwin includes favorite poems from two Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes; a selection of iconic translations; and lesser-known prose narratives. As the formalism of Merwins early work loosens into the open, unpunctuated style he developed later in his careerwhen urgent times demanded innovative modes of expressionreaders can trace the evolution of one voices commitment to moral, spiritual, and aesthetic inquiry. Across the decades, beyond headlines, policies, and trends, W.S. Merwins poems point to the lessons that hide in the shadows of sentience. Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.W.S. Merwin Noahs Raven Why should I have returned? My knowledge would not fit into theirs. I found untouched the desert of the unknown, Big enough for my feet. It is my home. It is always beyond them. The future Splits the present with the echo of my voice. Hoarse with fulfillment. I never made promises. Since launching his career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award 1952, W. S. Merwin has authored dozens of books of poetry, prose, and translation. A beloved voice in American literature, Merwin is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Hawaii, within the palm forest where he wrote, On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.
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(W.S. Merwin is arguably the most influential American poe...)
W.S. Merwin is arguably the most influential American poet of the last half-century - an artist who has transfigured and reinvigorated the vision of poetry for our time. An essential voice in modern American literature, he was United States Poet Laureate in 2010-11. This new collection written in his late-80s finds him deeply immersed in reflection on the passage of time and the frailty and sustaining power of memory. Telegraphing between past and present, he shows us a powerful and moving vision of the eternal, focusing on images of mornings, sunsets, shifting seasons, stars, birds and insects to capture the connectedness of time, space and the natural world. In a poem about Li Po, 'now there is only the river / that was always on its own way'. In another poem he dreams that 'the same river is still here / the house is the old house and I am here in the morning / in the sunlight and the same bird is singing'. He remembers when 'dragonflies were as common as sunlight / hovering in their own days' and recalls 'a house that had been left to its own silence / for half a century'. In a poem of wonder entitled 'Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud', he writes: 'I keep looking for what has always been mine / searching for it even as I / think of leaving it.'
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Born William Stanley Merwin in New York City, United States on September 30, 1927, he was the son of a Presbyterian minister.
His earliest poems, unpublished, written at Princeton University in the years just prior to his 1948 graduation, were bleak reflections on the deaths of his classmates in World War II.
Merwin has always lived and worked in an ethically assertive fashion. He began to write eloquently on ecological issues in the late 1950's, spoke out in favor of disarmament and against the Vietnam war in the 1960's, and in the 1980's worked to block destructive land development and restore native rights in Hawaii. He settled in a house he designed himself on the island of Maui, surrounded by the fruit trees and gardens that supply most of his food.
Merwin's work is also controversial because it has undergone radical stylistic change. His first published collections--A Mask for Janus (1952), The Dancing Bears (1954), and Green With Beasts (1956)--were elegant, formally self-conscious romantic and mythological exercises, where he pursued "the daze and fall of fabulous voyages. "
In The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), however, especially in the animal poems and in the poems about the sea, a darker, less controlled, more obsessional element enters. Then in The Moving Target (1963) came the most famous of his stylistic changes. He abandoned all the excesses of his earlier voice, abandoned punctuation as well, and developed the stripped-down style and post-apocalyptic themes that carried him through The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970), and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973).
Sometimes carrying specific historical references, these poems more often reflect a sense of holocaust that can no longer be named or dated; "they are paper bells/ Calling to nothing living"; each is a stone that "commemorates/ the emptiness at the end of history. "In the 1970's Merwin began to feel more hopeful. The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988) at times reflect an optimism he sees in a nature essentially indifferent to human presence. He also devoted more time to prose. The mythic parables gathered in The Miner's Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977) gave way to the more open autobiographical writings in Unframed Originals (1982) and Regions of Memory (1987). In 1994 the Academy of American Poets named Merwin the first winner of the Tanning Prize, a $100, 000 annual prize to honor poets "of outstanding and proven mastery. "
( Named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by The N...)
( America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel ab...)
( The Essential W.S. Merwin beautifully demonstrates why...)
(W.S. Merwin is arguably the most influential American poe...)