Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist W.S. Merwin, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award Poetry prize, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday, Oct. 27 for an evening with The Poet in Nature. The program will include a reading and discussion of his work, a career spanning five decades. The public portion of the evening begins at 6:45. Seating is free, on a first-come basis.
Merwin, who was born in New York City and spent his boyhood in Union City, N.J., and Scranton, Pa., 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, and spent a year of postgraduate studies at Princeton, focused on Romance languages. He further developed his love of languages while traveling Europe as a young man, and in 1951, began work in London as a literary translator of Latin, French, and Spanish poetry. It was at about the same time that Merwin also became a tutor to the son of poet and novelist Robert Graves, the latter of whom was said to have had an early influence on Merwin's voice.
In the States, Merwin's first book of poetryA 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, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
Considered one of the foremost poets of the last half-century, 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."
His numerous other volumes of poetry include The Lice, The Compass Flower, Finding the Islands, and The Rain in the Trees. Merwin's career-spanning collection, Migration: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001 (2005, Copper Canyon Press), earned him standing as a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. He has been a finalist for the award seven previous times.
Merwin, whose works have long been inspired by the natural world, was the first recipient of the Tanning Prizethe largest literary award in the United Statesrecognizing outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. His numerous other awards include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, administered by the Yale University Library (W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, and e.e. cummings are past recipients), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded by The Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition." In 1999, he was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a position he shares with poets Rita Dove and Louise Glick.
Merwin was the beneficiary of the prestigious Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2005, was honored as laureate of the Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia, also receiving the festival's prominent Golden Wreath Award. His latest book of poetry Present Company, and the memoir Summer Doorways (Shoemakers & Hoard), both were released in 2005.