His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for his publisher, Copper Canyon Press.
Merwin was one of the most highly decorated poets in the nation, and very likely the world. He was the U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011; won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award and a spate of other honors; and was lauded for his volumes of prose and translations of poetry from a Babel of languages.
He was also one of the most prolific poets of his generation, his work appearing often in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere. After the release of his first collection, when he was in his mid-20s, he went on to publish nearly three dozen volumes of poetry, along with essays, short fiction, memoirs and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam and other poets.
In later years Merwin was equally known for his work as a conservationist — in particular for his painstaking restoration of depleted flora, including hundreds of species of palm, on the remote former pineapple plantation in Hawaii where he made his home. He had lived there, in blissful near-solitude, since the 1970s, refusing to answer the telephone.
Merwin’s ardor for the natural world took frequent root in his poetry. But while for many poets nature begets odes, for him it was far more likely to inspire elegies. In “For a Coming Extinction,” part of his acclaimed 1967 verse collection, “The Lice,” he wrote:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
Stylistically, Merwin’s mature work was known for metrical promiscuity; stark, sometimes epigrammatic language; and the frequent use of enjambment — the poetic device in which a phrase breaks over two consecutive lines, without intervening punctuation.
“It is as though the voice filters up to the reader like echoes from a very deep well, and yet it strikes his ear with a raw energy," poet and critic Laurence Lieberman wrote, discussing “The Lice,” a collection whose bitter contents were widely understood as a denunciation of the Vietnam War. He added:
“The poems must be read very slowly, since most of their uncanny power is hidden in overtones that must be listened for in silences between lines, and still stranger silences within lines.”
The themes that preoccupied Merwin most keenly were those that haunt nearly every poet: the earth, the sea and their myriad creatures; the cycle of the seasons; myth and spirituality (he was a practicing Buddhist); personal history and memory; and, above all, life and its damnable evanescence.
Yet there was about his work an intensity of purpose — heightened by a formal style not quite like anyone else’s — that, his champions maintained, gave it a fervor often described as oracular. A “post-Presbyterian Zen poet and channeler of ancient paradoxes,” The Los Angeles Times called him in 2007.
Some critics indicted Merwin’s later work for trafficking in a level of abstraction bordering on the obscure. It was rendered even less accessible, they complained, by the fact that by the late 1960s he had jettisoned punctuation almost entirely.
— Weight of Childhood
William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on Sept. 30, 1927.
His mother had been orphaned very young. She later lost her brother and her first child, Merwin’s older brother, who died shortly after birth.
The weight of those losses, Merwin said long afterward, pervaded every aspect of the family culture.
Young William was reared in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, preached. Besotted with language from a very young age, he wrote his first verse, hymns for his father’s congregation, at 5.
To their son’s early dismay, his parents were possessed of incurious minds and unpoetic souls.
Worse still, the elder Merwin was capricious and cold.
“During my early childhood he had been distant, unpredictable and harsh,” Merwin wrote in his memoir “Summer Doorways” (2005).
Small wonder, perhaps, that the son grew up to become an explorer of absence and a repairer of dissolution and ruin — on his Hawaiian homestead; of a derelict stone farmhouse in southwest France, where he lived at midcentury with his second wife, Dido Milroy; and, to the extent that the medium affords such redress, in poetry.
At 16, Merwin entered Princeton on a scholarship. There he began to read and write poetry in earnest, studying with poet and critic R.P. Blackmur and his teaching assistant, a young poet named John Berryman.
At 17, during World War II, Merwin enlisted in the Navy but realized immediately that he had “made a terrible mistake,” as he told NPR in 2008. A pacifist, he declared himself a conscientious objector and was consigned for about a year to the psychiatric ward of a Boston naval hospital.
Returning to Princeton, he received his bachelor’s degree in 1948; married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry; and stayed on to do graduate work in Romance languages.
Needing gainful employment, Merwin decamped with his wife for Europe, where he worked as a tutor to the children of the rich and famous.
He moved on to London, where he worked as a translator. After his marriage to Ferry ended in divorce, he wed Milroy, a ferocious, proprietary Englishwoman 15 years his senior, with whom he collaborated on a verse play.
Returning to the United States, he served as a poet in residence at the Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and fell in with the cohort of Boston-area poets around Robert Lowell.
Merwin and his wife returned to Europe. He reprised their time there in “The Lost Upland” (1992), a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories.
By the late 1960s, the couple had separated — they would later divorce — and Merwin, now an established poet, had moved to New York. In his mature style, the diffuse mythic imagery of his earlier work is supplanted by harder-edged invocations of the here and now. The meter is faster and looser, and, stripped of punctuation and most capitalization, his lines hurtle with sheer oral abandon.
Merwin received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his collection “The Carrier of Ladders.” The volume epitomized his concern with absence.
“Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine,” a poem from the collection, “Now It Is Clear,” begins:
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it.
Merwin publicly announced his intention to donate the thousand-dollar Pulitzer award to anti-war causes.
He married Paula Schwartz in 1983.
Merwin won a National Book Award in 2005 for “Migration: New and Selected Poems” and his second Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for “The Shadow of Sirius."
Merwin’s other laurels include the inaugural Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale; the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the PEN Translation Prize.
Merwin’s wife died in 2017. He is survived by two stepsons, Matthew Carlos Schwartz and novelist John Burnham Schwartz; two grandchildren; and a sister, Ruth Moser.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.