W. S. Merwin is a
Pulitzer Prize winning modern American
poet and
essayist. He was born in
New York City in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian minister for whom he wrote
hymns at the age of five. Merwin was raised in
New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. He graduated from
Princeton in 1947. From 1949 to 1951, He went to Europe and became a literary translator. He began writing poetry with formal and
medieval overtones as he was influenced by
Robert Graves and the poetry he translated. In the late 1950s, he wrote with a more American voice, after his two years in Boston, where he met
Robert Lowell,
Sylvia Plath,
Ted Hughes, and
Adrienne Rich. Merwin holds anti-
imperialist,
pacifist, and
environmentalist views. In his writings, he pays close attention to the way in which land and language interflow.
His first book, A Mask for Janus was published in 1952. His book of poems, entitled The Carrier of Ladders won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Other books are The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, Flower & Hand, The Compass Flower, Feathers from the Hill, Opening the Hand, The Rain in the Trees, Travels, The Vixen, The Lost Upland, Unframed Originals, The Folding Cliffs, The RiverSound and The Pupil. He lives and works in Hawaii.
Poems: