Lannan Foundation

W.S. Merwin poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read poets in America, with a career spanning five decades.  The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator.

Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice.  W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist beliefs. In 2005 he will have three new books:  Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001; a book of poems called Present Company; and the memoir Summer Doorways which chronicles his days as a student in seminary school and at Princeton, through the next years spent as a tutor for children of privilege living abroad. 

William Merwin was the recipient of the 2004 Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In his memoir, he describes a life in Europe that was already passing away at the close of the Second World War. He writes, “I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, at once fixed and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.”

In a career spanning five decades, he has published numerous books that explore the relationship between language and landscape, including The Folding Cliffs; The River Sound; and Flower & Hand.

Edward Hirsch has written, “Merwin is our strongest poet of silence and doubt, vacancy and absence, deprival and dispossession. He is a master of erasures and negations, a visionary of discomfort and reproof, the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry.”

W.S. Merwin had his first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952. Numerous poetry collections have followed as well as books of essays. He is a notable translator of poetry and drama, primarily from the French and Spanish, and also the classics, with nearly twenty titles published including a much-praised translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, and more recently, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

His distinctly American voice, honed over a career spanning five decades, has been acknowledged with many honors including the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, The Bollinger Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry, and the PEN Translation Prize.

He lives in Haiku, Hawaii.