“I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time. I think that’s a social role, don’t you? … We keep expressing our anger and our love, and we hope, hopelessly perhaps, that it will have some effect. But I certainly have moved beyond the despair, or the searing, dumb vision that I felt after writing The Lice; one can’t live only in despair and anger without eventually destroying the thing one is angry in defense of. The world is still here, and there are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don’t pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.”
W.S. Merwin, a poet and translator of the highest order, wrote the words above in response to a question about a poet’s social role, and what sticks with me is the “need to pay attention.” Merwin, who died on Friday, paid searing, probing attention, and readers — and society, if it will listen — are the better for his work.
Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927, and attended Princeton on a scholarship. He was 16, which is when he began, in a serious manner, his poetic journey. (His time at that university is what, years later, first led me to him, through John Berryman, one of my favorite poets. Berryman was R.P. Blackmur‘s teaching assistant, and Merwin studied under Blackmur.)
When he was 17, he enlisted in the Navy, but realized that he had made a “mistake,” as he told NPR. He registered as a conscientious objector and spent a year in a psychiatric ward in a Boston naval hospital. Merwin returned to Princeton at 18, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1948.
Europe, London, marriages, a home in the Dordogne region, divorces, New York in the late 1960s: Merwin lived and worked and traveled, and by the time he set up residence in New York City he was a poet in earnest.
Hawaii was next, and last, fittingly so, for Merwin. His life there, spent on 19 acres — a pineapple plantation that he replanted — was full of accomplishment, grace, writing, and acclaim. A documentary, To Plant a Tree, is a pleasure to watch. He lived on Maui, in a place called Haiku.
Here’s another piece on Merwin worth viewing.
I hope you read this man’s work. He has much to impart.
I close with this poem, Berryman.
Berryman
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
W.S. Merwin, “Berryman” from Migration. Copyright © 2005 by W.S. Merwin, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.Source:
Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
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