W.S. Merwin, a prolific and versatile poet who celebrated nature and condemned war and industrialism, has died. He was 91.
Merwin declined a Pulitzer in 1971 for "The Carrier of Ladders," citing the feeling of shame being an American during the Vietnam War evoked.
He died in his sleep at his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, according to publisher Copper Canyon Press and the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet founded. The changes in his work were no more dramatic than the changes in his life, which spanned continents and religious faiths. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was raised in the urban East during the Great Depression, spent years as a young man in France, Mexico, Spain and England and lived his final decades as a Buddhist in a solar-powered house he designed on an old pineapple plantation, surrounded by a rain forest, on the northeast coast of Maui.
In a household as grim as an abandoned parking lot, the way out was pointed by words, which seemed to float around Merwin like magic bubbles. He would try to memorize scripture he heard his father recite and fairy tales his mother toll him. By age 13, he was already composing hymns. Merwin's promise was obvious. His first collection,"A Mask for Janus," was selected by W.H. Auden for the coveted Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and was published in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he wrote poems and plays, including a verse production of"Rumpelstiltskin."
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