SOURCE: Roche, Thomas P., Jr. “Green with Poems.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 25, no. 1 (1963-64): 89-104.

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 scientific threats to mankind.

William S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and thereafter lived in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Princeton in 1948 and studied romance languages in the Princeton Graduate School for a time. Between 1949 and 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. His first volume of verse, A Mask for Janus, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952 and was followed in 1954 by The Dancing Bears, which won him the Kenyon Review Fellowship for poetry. His third volume, Green with Beasts (1956), was selected by the British Poetry Book Society...