W.S. Merwin, (born Sept. 30, 1927, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died March 15, 2019, Haiku, Hawaii), U.S. poet and translator. He attended Princeton University and earned critical acclaim with his first poetry collection, A Mask for Janus (1952). He became known for the spare style of his poetry, which often expressed concerns about the natural environment and humans’ relation to it. His volumes included The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970, Pulitzer Prize), Travels (1993), and The Shadow of Sirius (2008, Pulitzer Prize). His translations, often collaborations with others, ranged from plays of Euripides and Federico García Lorca to epics to ancient and modern works from Chinese, Sanskrit, and Japanese. Merwin also wrote several memoirs, including Summer Doorways (2006). From 1999 to 2000 he served—with Rita Dove and Louise Glück—as special poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, which was celebrating its bicentennial. He served as poet laureate from 2010 to 2011.
W.S. Merwin Article
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poetry Summary
Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.) Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and
novel Summary
Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an