Recent Athenaeum guest W.S. Merwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, has been awarded the 2005 National Book Award Poetry prize. Merwin has spoken at CMC four times since 1998 when he participated in the College's Milosz Festival, and most recently visited campus Oct. 27 for a reading and discussion of his work. He is a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award, winning this year for a career-spanning collection, Migration: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001 (2005, Copper Canyon Press).
The Atlantic Monthly has called Merwin's poems "as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground."
Merwin was born in New York City and began writing at age 5, creating hymns for his father, a Presbyterian minister. As a student at Princeton University, Merwin studied writing with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. His first book of poetry A Mask for Januswon the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1952, chosen by W.H. Auden. In tandem with the printing of his second collection of poems (Green with Beasts, 1956), he worked briefly as a playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and later as poetry editor at The Nation, between the publishing of his second and third collections, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) and The Moving Target (1963). It was Merwin's fifth book, The Carrier of Ladders, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971.