William Stanley Merwin was born on September 30, 1927, in New York City. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey, and then in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In the 1940s, he attended Princeton University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1947 and going on for just one year toward his graduate degree in modern languages. It was at Princeton that Merwin began writing poetry, with the encouragement of the noted literary figures R. P. Blackmur, Herman Bloch, and the poet John Berryman. He left there for Europe, where he earned his living for several years as a language tutor, living in France and Spain and Majorca. From 1951 to 1954, he lived in London and worked as a translator for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Once his reputation as a poet and translator began to build, Merwin returned to the United States, first living in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where...