SOURCE: "Stalking the Barbaric Yawp," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 804-15.

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 need to go outside Merwin's Selected Poems, but I would advise those who are not already devotees to start at the back of this book and work forward, since Merwin has bravely put his early work (his Yale Younger Poets collection from 1952) at the beginning. There is in every Merwin poem the authority that comes from a fine ear, but his early prosody does sound terribly old-fashioned…. Perhaps it is Merwin's hushed tone that gives the youthful work a stilted quality. To readers in 1989, these first poems will serve as reminders of what was fashionable and won prizes in 1952, just three years...