Deep Love Poems
Deep Love Poems Definition
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W.S.
Merwin is a major American writer whose poetry, translations, and prose
have won praise since W.H. Auden awarded his first book, A Mask for
Janus (1952), the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Though that first book
reflected the formalism of the period, Merwin eventually became known
for an impersonal, open style that eschewed punctuation. Writing in the
Guardian, Jay Parini described Merwin’s mature style as “his own kind of
free verse, [where] he layered image upon bright image, allowing the
lines to hang in space, largely without punctuation, without rhymes . . .
with a kind of graceful urgency.” Although Merwin’s writing has
undergone stylistic changes through the course of his career, a
recurring theme is man’s separation from nature. The poet sees the
consequences of that alienation as disastrous, both for the human race
and for the rest of the world. Merwin, who is a practicing Buddhist as
well as a proponent of deep ecology, has lived since the late 1970s on
an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii which he has painstakingly
restored to its original rainforest state.
Merwin
was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and
Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Of his
development as a writer, Merwin once said, “I started writing hymns for
my father almost as soon as I could write at all, illustrating them . . .
But the first real writers that held me were not poets: Conrad first,
and then Tolstoy, and it was not until I had received a scholarship and
gone away to the university that I began to read poetry steadily and try
incessantly, and with abiding desperation, to write it.” Merwin
attended Princeton University and studied with R.P. Blackmur and John
Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he continued as a post-graduate
student of Romance languages and eventually traveled through much of
Europe, translating poetry and working as a tutor, including for the son
of poet Robert Graves. Merwin’s early collections—especially A Mask for
Janus—reflect the influence of Graves and the medieval poetry Merwin
was translating at the time.
Indeed, the poetic
forms of many eras and societies are the foundation for a great deal of
Merwin’s poetry. His first books contain many pieces inspired by
classical models. According to Vernon Young in the American Poetry
Review, the poems are traceable to “Biblical tales, Classical myth, love
songs from the Age of Chivalry, Renaissance retellings; they comprise
carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas, and they contrive golden
equivalents of emblematic models: the masque, the Zodiac, the Dance of
Death.” In 1956, Merwin was offered a fellowship from the Poets’ Theater
in Cambridge, Massachusetts and returned to the U.S. His books from
this period, Green with Beasts (1956) and The Drunk in the Furnace
(1960), show the beginning of a shift in style and tone as Merwin began
to experiment with irregular forms. The Drunk in the Furnace, which was
written during Merwin’s tenure in Boston when he was meeting poets like
Robert Lowell, particularly shows his new engagement with American
themes. His obsession with the meaning of America and its values can
make Merwin sometimes seem like the great nineteenth-century poet Walt
Whitman, L. Edwin Folsom noted in Shenandoah. “His poetry . . . often
implicitly and sometimes explicitly responds to Whitman; his
twentieth-century sparsity and soberness—his doubts about the value of
America—answer, temper, Whitman’s nineteenth-century expansiveness and
exuberance—his enthusiasm over the American creation.”
Merwin’s
next books are his most critically acclaimed and continue to be
influential volumes. The Lice (1967), though often read as a response to
the Vietnam War, condemns modern man in apocalyptic and visionary
terms. “These are poems not written to an agenda but that create an
agenda,” wrote poet and critic Reginald Shepherd, “preserving and
recreating the world in passionate words. Merwin has always been
concerned with the relationship between morality and aesthetics,
weighing both terms equally. His poems speak back to the fallen world
not as tracts but as artistic events.” The Lice remains one of Merwin’s
best-known volumes of poetry. His next book, The Carrier of Ladders
(1970) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1971. He famously donated
the prize money to the draft resistance movement, writing an essay for
the New York Review of Books that outlined his objections to the Vietnam
War. His article spiked the ire of W.H. Auden, who wrote a response
arguing that the award was apolitical. The Carrier of Ladders shows
Merwin continuing to engage with American themes and nature, and
includes a long sequence on American westward expansion. That same year,
Merwin published The Miner’s Pale Children: A Book of Prose. Reviewing
both volumes for the New York Times, Helen Vendler noted that “these
books invoke by their subtitles the false distinction between prose and
poetry: the real distinction is between prose and verse, since both are
books of poems, with distinct resemblances and a few differences.”
Merwin
moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism in 1976. He eventually settled in
Maui and began to restore the forest surrounding his former plantation.
Both the rigor of practicing Buddhism and the tropical landscape have
greatly influenced Merwin’s later style. His next books increasingly
show his preoccupation with the natural world. The Compass Flower
(1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988) “are
concerned not only with what to renounce in the metropolis but also what
to preserve in the country,” noted Ed Hirsch in the New York Times.
Many of the poems in the last volume “immerse themselves in nature with a
fresh sense of numinousness,” said Hirsch, while also mourning the loss
of that nature to human greed and destruction. Merwin has continued to
produce striking poems using nature as a backdrop. The Vixen (1996), for
instance, is an exploration of the rural forest in southwestern France
that Merwin called home for many years. New Yorker critic J. D.
McClatchy remarked that “the book is suffused with details of country
life—solitary walks and garden work, woodsmoke, birdsong, lightfall.”
But Merwin’s later poetry doesn’t merely describe the natural world; it
also records and condemns the destruction of nature, from the felling of
sacred forests to the extinction of whole species. Migration: New and
Selected Poems (2005) exposes Merwin’s evolution as a stylist over half a
century but also shows, as Ben Lerner noted in his review of the volume
for Jacket, that “Merwin . . . is an unwaveringly political poet . . .
[he] not only tracks the literal impoverishment of our planet, but he
makes it symbolize the impoverishment of our culture’s capacity for
symbolization.” Migration was awarded the National Book Award for
poetry.
Some literary critics have identified
Merwin with the group known as the oracular poets, but Merwin himself
once commented: “I have not evolved an abstract aesthetic theory and am
not aware of belonging to any particular group of writers.” Reviewing
Migration for the New York Times, Dan Chiasson described Merwin poems as
“secular prophecy grounded on perceptual fineness.” But while Merwin’s
work from the 1960s and early ‘70s perhaps best embody this mode,
Chiasson believed that “its signature open form has been preserved
whatever the occasion. What began as stylistic necessity has become a
mannerism.” Merwin has continued to win high praise for his poetry,
however, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Shadow
of Sirius (2008). The book’s three sections deal with childhood and
memory, death and wisdom, and are some of the most autobiographical of
his career. The Pulitzer Prize committee cited the book for its
“luminous, often-tender poems that focus on the profound power of
memory.”
In addition to writing poetry, prose
and drama, Merwin is an accomplished and prolific translator of poetry.
His translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (2000) and the Middle English epic
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004) both won high praise for their
graceful, accessible verse. Merwin has also translated poets as diverse
as Osip Mandelstam and Pablo Neruda. His many honors include, the
Bollingen Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern
American Poetry a Ford Foundation grant, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize,
the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace
Stevens Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. He has
also been awarded fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Rockefeller Foundation. Merwin is a former Chancellor of The Academy of
American Poets and has served as Special Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress in 1999-2000 and as Poet Laureate in 2010-2011.
Merwin
was once asked what social role a poet plays—if any—in America. He
commented: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry
now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying
to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while
there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? ... We keep
expressing our anger and our love, and we hope, hopelessly perhaps,
that it will have some effect. But I certainly have moved beyond the
despair, or the searing, dumb vision that I felt after writing The Lice;
one can’t live only in despair and anger without eventually destroying
the thing one is angry in defense of. The world is still here, and there
are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is
a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still
around us. And you know, in a way, if you don’t pay that attention, the
anger is just bitterness.”
Deep Love Poems
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