A Brief Introduction to the Work of Our New U.S. Poet Laureate

Most Americans have heard by now that W.S. Merwin is our new U.S. Poet Laureate; but given the relatively small readership poetry commands in this country, many may know little or nothing about his work and accomplishments. Merwin, 82 now, has written over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose and has won countless awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Now that I’ve said something about his awards and prolificacy, I thought I would post some of his poetry. Even if you’ve already read the below poems, they're worth revisiting. Great poems always warrant and reward rereading.

Here’s a haunting poem of his that condemns the Vietnam War:

The Asians Dying

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains   
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead   
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed   
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands   
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star   
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows   
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future


Over the centuries many poets have written about death—Dickinson, Keats, Milton, Thomas Gray and Yeats, to name a few. In the below poem, Merwin finds an ingenious way to talk about his own future death:

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

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As for analyzing and summing up Merwin’s entire body of work, I won’t attempt to say much here. So much has already been written—and will continue to be written—on that subject. What I will say is that Merwin’s poetry, initially formal, soon evolved into an impersonal free verse that dispensed with punctuation. J.D. McClatchy adds, “Merwin’s early work absorbed the major traditions of English Romantic poetry; it is mythic or emblematic and richly rhetorical. By 1963, however, he had evolved a new style—austere, impersonal, disjunctive, often surrealistic.” While Merwin’s style has changed over the years, a major consistency in his work is the theme of humanity’s alienation from nature, an alienation he sees as catastrophic not only for the environment but for humanity itself.


Links to Merwin’s poems and basic info on him:

• "W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate" (NYT)
• The Poetry Foundation — Merwin’s poetry and a short bio on him
• The Academy of American Poets — Merwin’s poetry and a short bio on him

Link to an archive of literary criticism on Merwin’s poetry:

• LiteraryHistory.com

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