W. S. Merwin

After attending Princeton University in 1952, Merwin married Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and moved to Spain. During his stay there, while visiting the renowned poet Robert Graves at his homestead on the island of Majorca, he served as tutor to Graves's son. There, he met Dido Milroy, fifteen years his senior, with whom he collaborated on a play and whom he later married and lived with in London. In 1956, Merwin moved to Boston for a fellowship at the Poets' Theater. He returned to London, where he befriended Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In 1968, Merwin moved to New York City, separating from his wife Dido Milroy, who stayed at their home in France. In the late 1970s, Merwin moved to Hawaii and eventually was divorced from Dido Milroy. He married Paula Dunaway in 1983.[8]

From 1956 to 1957, Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet, he was a respected translator of Spanish, French, Latin and Italian literature and poetry (including Lazarillo de Tormes and Dante's Purgatorio)[9][10] as well as poetry from Sanskrit, Yiddish, Middle English, Japanese and Quechua. He served as selector of poems of the American poet Craig Arnold (1967–2009).[11]

Merwin is known for his poetry about the Vietnam War and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes writers Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa.[12]

Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of his poems featured animals. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a more autobiographical way.[13]

In the 1960s, Merwin lived in a small apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village.[6]

Merwin's volume Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry.[14]

In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiʻi in history and legend.[15]

The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.[2]

In June 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate, to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.[4][5] He is the subject of the 2014 feature documentary film Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, directed by Stefan Schaefer. A one-hour version, entitled "To Plant a Tree", was broadcast nationally on PBS. Merwin appeared in the PBS documentary The Buddha, released in 2010. He had moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken in 1976.[16]

In 2010, with his wife Paula, he co-founded The Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving his hand-built, off-the-grid poet's home and 18-acre restored property in Haiku, Maui, which has been transformed from an "agricultural wasteland" to a "Noah's Ark" for rare palm trees, one of the largest and most biodiverse collections of palms in the world.[17]

Merwin's last book of poetry, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was composed during the difficult process of losing his eyesight. When he could no longer see well enough to write, he dictated poems to his wife, Paula. It is a book about aging and the practice of living one's life in the present. Writing about Garden Time in The New York Times, Jeff Gordinier suggests that "Merwin's work feels like part of some timeless continuum, a river that stretches all the way back to Han Shan and Li Po."[18]

In 2017, Copper Canyon Press published The Essential W. S. Merwin, a book which traces the seven-decade legacy of Merwin's poetry, with selections ranging from his 1952 debut, A Mask for Janus, to 2016's Garden Time, as well as a selection of translations and lesser-known prose narratives. Merwin's literary papers are held at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The collection consists of some 5,500 archival items, and 450 printed books.[19][20]

Merwin's hometown honored him in 2006 by renaming a local street near his childhood home W. S. Merwin Way.[6]