WS Merwin

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WS Merwin (without photographer, without year, please note copyrights)

William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927 in New York City , New York - † March 15, 2019 in Maui , Hawaii ) was an American writer and translator who received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice .

Life

Born in New York to a Presbyterian minister, Merwin studied writing and Romance studies at Princeton University . After graduation, he traveled through France , England and finally Spain , where he taught Robert Graves' son in Mallorca in 1950 . Graves' predilection for subjects of ancient mythology carried over to Merwin.

From 1951 he worked as a translator in London until he returned to America, where he devoted himself to poetry. His first volume of poetry brought him the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1952 . Further volumes of poetry in the stylistic tradition of Wallace Stevens and Robert Graves, among others, followed.

In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment with lyrical forms, which he substantiated theoretically in essays such as On Open Form (1969). There were more and more topics from his own life, such as in 1960 in The Drunk in the Furnace . In 1971 he received the Pulitzer Prize for the volume The Carrier of Ladders , published the previous year . In 1970 his autobiography The Miner's Pale Children was published . Merwin spent his later years in Hawaii , where special attention is paid to nature in his poems . However, he was known for his poems, which, like Robert Bly , Adrienne Rich , Allen Ginsberg or Yusef Komunyakaa , dealt with the Vietnam War . In 1977 he also received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

After the verse novel Folding Cliffs: A Narrative published in 1998, further memoirs appeared in 2006 under the title Summer Doorways . He lived on Maui, Hawaii and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for the second time in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius .

Since autumn 2010 he was the 17th Poet Laureate in the USA. He was the successor to Kay Ryan .

Works (selection)

  • A Mask for Janus (1952)
  • Green with Beasts (1956)
  • The Moving Target (1963)
  • The Lice (1967)
  • The Compass Flower (1977)
  • Finding the Islands (1982)
  • The Rain in the Trees (1988)
  • Travels (1993)
  • The Vixen (1996)
  • Flower & Hand (1997)
  • The River Sound (1999)
  • The Pupil (2001)
  • Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005)

literature

  • Cheri Davis: WS Merwin . Twayne, Boston 1981, ISBN 0-8057-7301-0 .
  • Jay Parini : Merwin, W (illiam) S (tanley). In: Ian Hamilton (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996.

Web links

Commons : WS Merwin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patricia Cohen: WS Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate. In: The New York Times . June 30, 2010, accessed March 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Merwin, WS
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Merwin, William Stanley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH September 30, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , New York
DATE OF DEATH 15th March 2019
Place of death Maui