This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin’s early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin’s work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.
Author(s): Cheri Colby Langdell
Series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 367
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Some Background on Merwin
Evangelist of Nature
Merwin and Other Poets
Nature, Zen, and Ecopoetics
The Poet’s Craft
The Sense of an Ending
Conclusion: The Survivor: “the future splits the present with the echo of my voice”
Part I: Merwin and Other Poets
Chapter 2: “High Company”: W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the Art of Poetry
“Berryman”
“Lament for the Makers”
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 3: The Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin
Works Cited
Chapter 4: The Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward
Works Cited
Part II: Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics
Chapter 5: Bound to Reverence: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time, and Nature in W.S. Merwin’s Poetry
Not Knowing and Emptiness
Emptiness and the Sources of Poetry
Connectedness and Not Knowing
Loss and Dispossession
The Dark Side of God, the Nameless One
Writing to Stop the Coming Extinction
Psalms of Nature in His Poetry
The Reign of No One, Dark Prophecy
Speaking to Whom?
Prayer
Emptiness, Origins Obliterated
Centeredness in Buddhism
Time and Timelessness in Nature
Awakening in/to Nature
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Reverence for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Others
Trees as Blessings: Wendell Berry
W.S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees
Connection to the Land
Connection to the Past
Keeper of Values; Source of Meaning
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 8: The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin
Works Cited
Part III: The Poet’s Craft
Chapter 9: “A Sense of Being Linked with People”: Poetry, Listening, Intonation
Introduction
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Lyric “Unpunctuation”: W. S. Merwin’s Early New Yorker Correspondence
Works Cited
Chapter 11: W.S. Merwin’s Homecoming in the Heart of Europe
An “Un-American” Poem?
Bringing Dead Languages Back to Life
The Custodian of Ancient Traditions
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 12: Resilience of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin’s “Forgotten Language”
Aphorism and “Finality of Utterance”
Translation and Anacoluthon
The End of Punctuation and Beginning of Orality
Delphic-Style Oracular Rhetoric
Oracular Environmentalism
Riddles, Answers, Altered Realities
Poetics of Preservation and Astonishment
Works Cited
Part IV: The Sense of an Ending
Chapter 13: W.S. Merwin’s “Retirement”: Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After
Works Cited
Chapter 14: Merwin’s Epic of Dispossession
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Memory, Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin’s Later Poetry
Works Cited
Chapter 16: “The Last Days of the World”: Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats
“The End of the World as We Know It...” (Our Fascination with the Apocalypse)
“We Thought It Was There and Would Stay….” (Yeats and Merwin’s Visions)
“The Whole World Is Burning…” (Reversals of Fortune)
“Behold the Smoke Has Come Home…” (The Earth’s Grim Fate)
“Wrapped in the Bed of Ashes…” (Man’s Self-Destruction)
“Everything I Remember…” (Mourning Our Loss)
A Greater Purpose (Conclusion)
Works Cited
Chronology
Index
