W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin – Life, Poetry, and Enduring Legacy

Explore the extraordinary life of W. S. Merwin — American poet, translator, and environmentalist (born September 30, 1927) — through his biography, poetic evolution, themes, and most resonant quotations.

Introduction

William Stanley “W. S.” Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) was one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose, and translated works from languages around the world. Known for a spare, unpunctuated style, he addressed themes of loss, nature, memory, and moral conscience. He also devoted much of his later life to ecological restoration in Hawaiʻi, intertwining poetry and environmental action.

Merwin’s significance endures today because his work invites readers to slow down, witness, and reflect—on what is fading, what is lost, and what might yet remain. His life is a testament to the power of language, silence, and stewardship.

Early Life and Family

W. S. Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927.

From a young age, Merwin was drawn to language and the natural world. At age five, he began composing hymns for his father’s congregation—his earliest writings.

This deep childhood attunement to nature laid the groundwork for his later poetic sensibilities—his constant concern with loss, with what remains, and with the living world.

Education & Early Influences

Merwin went on to attend Princeton University, earning his B.A. in English.

Early in his career, Merwin lived in Europe (Spain, France, England). In Spain, he acted as a tutor in Majorca and met writers such as Robert Graves.

His early poetic voice was somewhat more formal, mythic, and structured; over time he gradually shed formal constraints and developed the more minimalist, observational style for which he is famous.

Career and Accomplishments

Poetic Works & Evolution

Merwin’s first major poetry book, A Mask for Janus (1952), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1971), Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005), The Shadow of Sirius (2008), and Garden Time (2016), among many others.

His formal experimentation—especially the dropping of punctuation, the use of enjambment and lines that flow without obvious breaks—became one of his hallmarks.

In 2005, Migration: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry. The Shadow of Sirius won him a second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

In 2010–2011, Merwin served as the United States Poet Laureate.

Towards the end of his life, as he lost his eyesight, he dictated his later poems (notably in Garden Time) to his wife Paula.

Environmental & Restoration Work

Beyond poetry, Merwin was deeply committed to ecological restoration. In 1977 he purchased an 18-acre former pineapple plantation in Haiku, Maui, and gradually transformed it into a thriving, biodiverse palm forest.

He and his wife Paula co-founded The Merwin Conservancy, dedicated to preserving his home and the restored land as a living legacy of art and nature.

His poetic practice, particularly in later years, was deeply interwoven with his land stewardship: reading and writing in the forest, witnessing growth, decay, regeneration.

Merwin died in his sleep on March 15, 2019, at his home in Haiku, Maui.

Themes, Style & Literary Significance

Silence, Loss, and Impermanence

One of Merwin’s enduring concerns is what is lost — the erasure of memory, language, ecosystems, traditions. His poems often evoke absence and longing.

Nature, Ecology, and Deep Time

Merwin is often classified among poets of ecological conscience. His work registers the fragility of natural systems and human alienation from them.

Minimalism and the Unpunctuated Line

Merwin increasingly abandoned punctuation, allowing the poem’s rhythm and breath to carry meaning.

Translation and Polyphony

His role as translator is integral — Merwin believed that inhabiting other voices enriches one’s own poetic imagination. Selected Translations and works like Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson extend his reach into global poetic conversation.

Moral & Ethical Voice

Though not an overt political poet in conventional terms, Merwin’s work is deeply moral. He engages with war, injustice, human destructiveness, memory, and responsibility. His poems are often quiet, but they bear weight.

Legacy & Influence

Merwin’s influence is broad. He continues to inspire poets who seek restraint over grandiosity, attention over spectacle, ecological witness over anthropocentrism. The Essential W. S. Merwin (2017) as a distillation of his life’s work.

Memorable Quotes by W. S. Merwin

Here are a few lines and remarks that reflect his voice:

• “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out / Tireless traveler …”
  — from For the Anniversary of My Death, a poem queering time and mortality.

• “One of the things that’s hard to talk to people about is that knowledge is all that we know … is nothing in comparison with what we don’t know.”
  — reflecting humility before the unknown.

• “I have waked and slipped from the calendars / from the creeds of difference and the contradictions / that were my life …”
  — from a late poem, capturing his sense of slipping from constructs.

• “After an age of leaves and feathers / someone dead / thought of this mountain as money …”
  — illustrating his links between nature, loss, and human valuation.

• On his writing practice: “He wrote nearly every day of his life, from the morning until about two in the afternoon.”

These lines, though fragmentary, underscore the quiet depth, the moral urgency, and the attention to impermanence that define Merwin’s work.

Lessons from W. S. Merwin

From his life and via his poetry, we might draw these lessons:

1. The power of listening and patience
   Merwin’s work teaches that silence, spacing, and restraint can speak as loudly as exuberance.

2. Language as stewardship
   For Merwin, writing was not merely expression but a duty—to memory, to nature, to lost forms of speech.

3. Integration of art and ecology
   His restoration of land and poetic practice were not separate — they modeled a life in which art attends to the living world.

4. Evolve continually
   Over decades, Merwin refused to remain static; his style, concerns, and voice transformed.

5. Humility before the unknown
   Despite mastery, Merwin’s best poems confront the limits of knowledge, inviting openness.

Conclusion

W. S. Merwin’s life and poetry offer a rare confluence of craft, conscience, and care. From humble beginnings writing hymns in Pennsylvania, through formal training, translation exploration, poetic reinvention, and ecological work in Hawaiʻi, he forged a path both deeply personal and universally resonant.

His minimal lines, his silences, his concern for the environment, and his unshakable sense of moral witness ensure that his voice lives on. For readers and writers alike, Merwin remains a beacon: how to write with care, how to listen with love, how to live among what is fragile with reverence.