W.S. Merwin
Born September 30, 1927, in New York City, William Stanley Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five.
He was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton University on a scholarship.
As a young man, Merwin went to Europe and developed a love of languages. He lived in Majorca, London, France, Mexico, and several places in the United States, including Boston and New York.
In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaiʻi to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway in 1983.
For over forty years, William and Paula lived in a house that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging, and extractive agricultural practices.
Together, the Merwins restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world. Paula Merwin died in 2017. William continued to live, write, and garden in Hawaiʻi until he died at home on Friday, March 15th, 2019.
W.S. Merwin in Conversation
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Writing
W.S. Merwin wrote nearly every day of his life, from the morning until about two in the afternoon. Across seven decades, his dedicated practice produced an extraordinary range of critically-acclaimed poetry, prose, and translations that span a staggering range of subjects and styles. His writing is collected in nearly fifty books.
In the introduction to The Essential W.S. Merwin, William’s longtime editor Michael Wiegers wrote: “W.S. Merwin’s poems have illuminated their tumultuous times, global and domestic, and all the while he has, through his poetry, consistently discovered and created grace.”
Poetry
A Mask for Janus (1952)
The Dancing Bears (1954)
Green with Beasts (1956)
The Drunk in the Furnace (1960)
The Moving Target (1963)
Collected Poems (1966)
The Lice (1967)
Amimae (1969)
The Carrier of Ladders (1970)
Signs (1970)
Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (1973)
The First Four Books of Poems (1975)
The Compass Flower (1977)
Feathers from the Hill (1978)
Finding the Islands (1982)
Opening the Hand (1983)
The Rain in the Trees (1987)
Selected Poems (1988)
The Second Four Books of Poems (1993)
Travels (1994)
The Vixen (1996)
Flower & Hand (1996)
The Folding Cliffs (1998)
The River Sound (1999)
The Pupil (2001)
Present Company (2005)
Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 (2005)
Selected Poems (2005)
The Shadow of Sirius (2009)
The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin (2013)
The Moon Before Morning (2014)
Garden Time (2016)
The Essential W.S. Merwin (2017)
Prose
The Miner’s Pale Children (1970)
Houses & Travelers (1977)
Unframed Originals (1983)
The Lost Uplands (1992)
The Mays of Ventadorn (2002)
The Ends of the Earth (2004)
Summer Doorways (2005)
The Book of Fables (2007)
What is a Garden? (University of South Carolina Press, 2016)
Translations
Spanish Ballads (1961)
Antonio Porchia’s Voices (1969)
Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort (1969)
Selected Translations, 1948 – 1968 (1969)
The Peacock’s Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India, with J. Moussaief Masson (1981)
Roberto Juarroz’s Vertical Poetry (1988)
Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki – Poems and Sermons (1989)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002)
Transparence of the World (2003)
Purgatorio (2018)
Listen to Poems by W.S. Merwin
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Recognition
In addition to the appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010, W.S. Merwin is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He was recipient of the Bollingen Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Lilly Prize and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry and Present Company, which closely followed it, earned him the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
Merwin translated both Dante’s Purgatorio and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for which he won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Howard Morton Landon Translation Prize. In 1999, W.S. Merwin was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for a jointly-held position along with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glück. He has been honored as laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia, receiving the international poetry award, the Golden Wreath Award. He received the 1971 Pulitzer prize for Poetry for his collection The Carrier of Ladders, and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Shadow of Sirius, widely praised as one of his finest books and lauded by one reviewer as “the irreducible essence of his art.” The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was awarded to Merwin in November 2010.
Trees
I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
—from The Compass Flower (1977)
Documentary
Maui filmmaker Stefan Schaefer tells the story of W.S. Merwin’s life in the feature-length documentary Even Though the Whole World is Burning (2014, Cicala Filmworks). It is available to view here.
