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 ethical vision of being, W. S. Merwin would be that poet. One of the most prolific poets of his generation, he has also produced translations, critical essays, memoirs, prose fiction, and plays. Many of his exemplary translations are definitive, and his essays, memoirs, and fiction are highly regarded; but it is certainly as a poet that Merwin is most widely recognized and most controversial. Merwin has created a body of poetry that is a severe meditation on the nature and condition of language; his is a body of poetry, moreover, that deeply probes the ways in which language crucially mirrors human identity and human action. Nevertheless, even while his poetry relentlessly...