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W. S. Merwin: Collected Poems 1952–1993

Edited by J. D. McClatchy

“Since early on, almost every step of the way, Merwin has shown himself to be wrestling with his aesthetic ideas and ideals, striving toward simplicity, though held in check by a showy desire to make complicated transformations happen, to impress the reader with virtuosity. He began to overcome this showiness by the time of The Lice. It’s nothing short of enlightening to watch him make that journey.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Review of Books

Overview

Overview

News Remembering “the Proteus of American poets,” W. S. Merwin, 1927–2019
March 27, 2019

Interviews J. D. McClatchy on W. S. Merwin: “A new sound for American poems”
March 15, 2019

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Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former poet laureate of the United States, W. S. Merwin is one of our most widely read and admired poets. This first volume in The Library of America’s two-volume edition of his poetry gathers thirteen books that chart a remarkable literary evolution across five decades.

Merwin’s early, formalist poems were the fruits of a long and intensive initiation into his craft carried on through his encounters as a Princeton undergraduate in the mid-1940s with the poets R. P. Blackmur and John Berryman, his crucial correspondence with Ezra Pound, and his first forays into translation. Awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize, Merwin’s first collection, A Mask for Janus (1952), showed how brilliantly he had assimilated the influences of Pound, W. H. Auden, and other poets of the modernist era, and revealed his mastery of such forms as the ballad and the sestina. In the three volumes that followed—The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956), and The Drunk in the Furnace (1960)—Merwin continued to use traditional forms and meter to write searchingly about animals, the sea, biblical figures, and the themes of myth and legend.

In The Moving Target (1963), Merwin adopted a startlingly new poetic style, employing a looser, more flexible line and, in the poems that concluded the book, abandoning the use of punctuation: “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word, one step toward that was to do away with punctuation, make the movement of the words do the punctuating for themselves, as they do in ordinary speech.” In tandem with this stylistic change, Merwin began to engage with “new and urgent questions” brought on by political events. The Lice (1967), one of the most important books of poetry published in the 1960s, responded with impassioned outrage to the Vietnam War (“The Asians Dying”) and forebodings of environmental catastrophe (“For a Coming Extinction”).

Although political concerns have never receded from his poetry, many of Merwin’s poems since the 1960s address the timeless themes of human mortality and the enigmas of consciousness. Merwin has also written moving autobiographical poems about his family, his years living in Manhattan, and his life on the island of Maui, where he moved in 1978.

Collected Poems 1952–1993 concludes with a selection of previously uncollected poems, chosen by editor J. D. McClatchy in consultation with the author, including “Camel,” related thematically to the animal poems of Green with Beasts, and “Views from the High Camp,” a visionary reckoning with loss.

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J. D. McClatchy (1945–2018) was the author of many books of poetry and essays, including Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (2014), and the editor of nine Library of America publications. He wrote the libretto for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of Our Town, taught at Yale University, and served as editor of The Yale Review.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-208-1 852 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 240 Library of America Series

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