William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1947 he received an A.B. in English from Princeton University. He worked as a ...
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If there is one poet who serves as a guide through this perilous second half of the century and whose work serves as an example of both the contemporary poetic process and its inextricable bonds to an...
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Myers is an American educator, poet, biographer, and critic. Simms is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the following interview, which was conducted in 1982 during Southern Methodist Universi...
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Below, Leddy offers a mixed review of Travels.
The themes of the forty-six poems in Travels, W. S. Merwin's first collection since The Rain in the Trees (1988), are familiar ones: displacement,...
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An American poet and educator, Stern was one of the judges for the 1994 Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize. The other judges were Deborah Digges and Stephen Dunn. In the following essay, Stern offers...
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Christhilf is an educator, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines various themes in Merwin's poetry, particularly his focus on such mythic elements and concerns as mortality, i...
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In the review below, Pettingell offers a thematic analysis of The Rain in the Trees.
It is no wonder that poetry concerned with spiritual perceptions tends to be pastoral. When people embody ideas fro...
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In the following essay, Clifton discusses Merwin's focus on visionary experiences, the unconscious, and death in his poetry.
After quoting Blake's own words to establish his work as esse...
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Wakoski is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt, she comments on Selected Poems, noting thematic similarities between the poetry of Merwin and Walt Whitman.
There is no nee...
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In the following excerpt, Jarman assesses Selected Poems and The Rain in the Trees, noting Merwin's concern with ecological themes.
Like many readers of my generation, I first became aware of W...
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Brunner is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses the major themes and principles that inform Merwin's poetry.
Entering his fifth decade of writing, W. S. Merwi...
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In the excerpt below, Kitchen examines the convergence of style and theme in Travels.
W. S. Merwin's most recent book, Travels, is permeated by a healthy nostalgia for what has been lost to us&...
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Howard is an American educator and poet. In the following mixed review, he remarks on the style and themes of Travels.
With the publication of The Lice in 1967, W. S. Merwin brought a bold style and a...
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Critical Essay by Thom Gunn
I always find difficulty in adequately explaining my faint misgivings on reading the work of W. S. Merwin. For, though he doesn't have the range of Nemerov, he has a...
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Critical Essay by Cheri Colby Davis
Gifted with prophetic powers, Merwin has been aware, for longer than most, that our nation is headed on a course of environmental and economic self-destruction; and...
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Critical Essay by Linda W. Wagner
As W. S. Merwin's work illustrates, the poet today wins his audience by involving it in his seemingly personal activity—or, as Merwin writes in "...
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Critical Essay by Vernon Young
Collectively, [the verses of The First Four Books of Poems] echo and reaffirm a prolific anthology of tongues, testifying, of course, to Merwin as translator, one of the...
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Critical Essay by L. Edwin Folsom
[Merwin's poetry] is not Whitmanesque, but, like Whitman, Merwin has been obsessed with the meaning of America. His poetry, especially The Lice and the America...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
[The Miner's Pale Children: A Book of Prose and The Carrier of Ladders: A Book of Poems] invoke by their subtitles the false distinction between prose and poetry...
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Critical Essay by Cheri Colby Davis
A thematic preoccupation with memory dominates much of Merwin's poetry. Understanding Merwin's attitude toward memory and its function in the poem enh...
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Critical Essay by Victor Contoski
The journey implied in [the titles of Merwin's Houses and Travellers and The Compass Flower], the journey of life, if you will, occurs time and time again. But...
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Critical Essay by Vincent B. Sherry, Jr.
The poetry of W. S. Merwin comprises things both old and new. Since his first volume A Mask for Janus won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952, he has in his o...
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Critical Essay by Timothy Steele
To what extent Merwin has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Rousseau or Novalis or Shelley, I will not hazard a guess. It is difficult, however, to read his ...
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In the following essay, Roche discusses some themes in Merwin's poetry, including the journey and myth, and comments that they reflect his concerns with totalitarianism, disarmament, and scient...
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In the following interview, originally conducted in 1981, Merwin discusses his feelings about Whitman and Thoreau, his use of language, and his development as a poet.
[Folsom]: You have rarely done in...
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In the following essay, Hoeppner discusses Merwin's enigmatic style and the problems it creates for readers and critics alike. Hoeppner attributes this opaqueness to Merwin's use of obje...
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In the following essay, Clifton explores Merwin's visionary poetry—poetry that deals with altered states of consciousness—written between 1962 and 1977, asserting that it exhibits...
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In the following essay, Bowers suggests that Merwin's poetry may pose difficulty for critics because they fail to view his work in the context of postmodernism.
When W. S. Merwin's1 firs...
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In the following essay, Frazier explores the almost disembodied character of many of Merwin's narrators and suggests that the poet uses them in order to tell a story without the burden of ego.
...
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In the following essay, Finley discusses how Merwin's use of riddles in his poetry contributes to their enigmatic tone.
Habit is evil, all habit, even speech And promises prefigure their own br...
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In the following review, Burt examines Merwin's book-length poem The Folding Cliffs, declaring it one of the few distinguished narrative poems of the 1990s.
Over the last two hundred years, poe...
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In the following essay, Andersen characterizes Merwin's work as a poetry of evolution based on a philosophy that depends on an ever-changing point of view.
W. S. Merwin's poetry (The Dan...
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In the following essay, Vogelsang analyzes Merwin's treatment of the dichotomies between words and the objects they represent, and between man and the divine.
The early poetry of W. S. Merwin f...
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In the following essay, Ramsey discusses the evolution of Merwin's style and themes, focusing on The Lice and its place in Merwin's oeuvre.
Too much has been made, probably, of the New D...
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In the following essay, Libby explores the development of Merwin's poetry, noting his increased focus on themes of emptiness and cultural death.
Of the immortal in “Blue” Merwin w...
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In the following essay, Davis discusses Merwin's use of time in his poetry, focusing on such poems as “The Counting Houses,” “The Last People,” and “The Port....
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In the following essay, Folsom examines what he regards as Merwin's obsession with the “meaning of America” as well as his response to Walt Whitman's characterization of it...
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In the following essay, Contoski disagrees with the critical opinion that Merwin's later works are obscure, suggesting instead that the poems are difficult to analyze because of Merwin's...
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In the following essay, Sherry provides analysis of Merwin's merging of traditional forms in his early works with his later use of free association and surrealism, discussing poems from The Com...
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Resurrection of Nature and Modernity in Merwin's `Drunk in the Furnace'
By
Golam Rabbani
29th batch
M.A.
Session: 2003-2004
Department of English
Jahangirnagar Univesity
Savar, Dhaka
Banglad...
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W(illiam) S(tanley) Merwin
