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.

Provides new and timely insights into W. S. Merwin's work as a major American poet Explores Merwin's eco-poetry in light of our current environmental crisis Considers Merwin's oeuvre as a whole, including his later poetry

Autorentext

Cheri Colby Langdell, a member of the Emily Dickinson International Society, the Modernist Studies Association, and the Pacific Association of Ancient and Modern Languages, has published in the Emily Dickinson Journal and is the author of W.S. Merwin (1981) and Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (2004), as well as other books, reviews and articles. She has taught at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Southern California, and in the UK at the University of Nottingham, the University of Leicester, Birkbeck University of London and Queen Mary University of London. She now teaches at East Los Angeles College and Los Angeles Valley College, USA.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Merwin and Other Poets.- Chapter 2: High Company: W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the Art of Poetry.- Chapter 3: The Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin.- Chapter 4: The Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward.- Part II: Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics.- Chapter 5: Bound to Reverence: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time, and Nature in W.S. Merwin's Poetry.- Chapter 6: Merwin's Ecopoetic Conservancy.- Chapter 7: Reverence for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Others.- Chapter 8: The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin.- Part III: The Poet's Craft.- Chapter 9: A Sense of Being Linked with People: Poetry, Listening, Intonation.- Chapter 10: Lyric Unpunctuation: W. S. Merwin's Early New Yorker Correspondence.- Chapter 11: W.S. Merwin's Homecoming in the Heart of Europe.- Chapter 12: Resilience of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin's Forgotten Language.- Part IV: The Sense of an Ending.- Chapter 13: W.S. Merwin's Retirement: Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After.- Chapter 14: Merwin's Epic of Dispossession.- Chapter 15: Memory, Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin's Later Poetry.- Chapter 16: The Last Days of the World: Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats.