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.

Collected Poems 1952–1993 PDF

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