Critical Essay | Critical Review by Ben Howard

SOURCE: A review of Travels, in Poetry, Vol. CLXIII, No. 3, December, 1993, pp. 167-70.

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 fresh sense of the numinous to contemporary American poetry. Since that time, he has perfected his distinctions—the luminous image, the immaculate phrase, the power to make things strange. Writing in a fluid unpunctuated style, void of conventional syntax and traditional prosody, he has imbued his abiding motifs—water, silence, trees, and stones—with a dreamlike desolation and an aura of imminent departure.

In Travels, an assortment of lyric poems, narratives, and verse biographies, Merwin continues his familiar pursuit, investing a wide variety of settings and subjects with a mood of elegiac sadness. Merwin's settings range from South America to...
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