W.S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin is an American poet who was born in 1927, in New York. He lived there until 1936, and he then moved to Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister, for whom Merwin wrote hymns during his youth. In the 1940s, Merwin attended Princeton University, where he discovered his love for literature. He graduated in 1946, but pursued his studies by learning Romance languages for a few more years. After his studies, Merwin met and married his first wife and went to the island of Majorca, where he tutored the son of the British poet Robert Graves for a few months. During this time, Merwin was influenced by Graves’s work and started translating old medieval poetry. He wrote the collection of poems A mask for Janus, which earned him his first award in 1952.

Later, Merwin went to live in Europe for a few years. He divorced his wife and married Dido Milroy, whom he had met while in Majorca.

In 1956, Merwin received a fellowship from the Poets’ Theater in Massachusetts, and moved to Boston. During his time at the Theater, Merwin started shifting his style, moving from a more formalist style to a more irregular approach, without any punctuation and with a freer style. This can be seen in The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), which shows a newfound interest in American values and themes: this is because when he was at the Theater, he was influenced by poets like Robert Lowell.In 1962, Merwin started translating poetry from many languages from all around the world. He would later go back to live in Europe with his wife.

In 1967, he wrote The Lice as a violent reaction against the Vietnam War, but would later admit in an interview to having changed his viewpoint on the matter. Some years later, in 1970, he would write The Carriers of Ladders, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize. It is also good to note that he went back to Europe in the 1960s with his second wife Dido, but they would get divorced in 1968, and he went back to New York.

In 1976, he moved to Hawaii and studied with Robert Aitken (a Buddhist master). There he also met and married in 1983 his third and last wife: Paula Dunaway Schwartz. He then settled in Maui and began helping to restore the tropical forest. The Buddhism and environmentalism he lived in greatly influenced his works: they started to have a much more ecologist/Buddhist perspective. 

Near the end of his life, Merwin founded, with the help of his wife, The Merwin Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on the preservation of their property in Haiku, which was changed from its former barren state to a modern “Noah’s Ark”, containing many of the different palm trees existing around the world. His last book, Garden Time (2016) was written by his wife because Merwin was losing his eyesight.

We can consider Merwin as one of the greatest poets/writers of his time: throughout his entire life, he wrote twenty-nine poetry books, four books of prose, three plays, twenty translations and he edited two books. He also won twenty-nine literary prizes for his works.

Louis Marlier, Maximilien Somme

SOURCES:

- https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/book/lice 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin

- https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/w-s-merwin

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/w-s-merwin

- https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/winter/feature/over-career-spanning-six-decades-american-poet-w-s-merwin-transformed-anger-art

- https://merwinconservancy.org/about-w-s-merwin/