Over the years, I’ve spent many such sunny spring days as
this wistfully reading poetry. At first,
I simply basked in both otherwise unaffected.
Next, I thought I had come to understand both and I reflected back their
energy. I was an adept.
But I was an adept at basking not at shining or writing
poetry. I knew I had a long way to
go. I was all at sea.
The most disconcerting aspect of being in such a
condition was the clear attraction it had for others who saw me as a promising object
of subjugation. As I traversed the first
stage of making my way out — in my case, the journey from befuddled to bemused —
I was flattered and used by those who felt they’d impressed me and disparaged
and/or ignored by those who felt they hadn’t.
Those in the first group who learned that I was not always
impressed quickly became members of the second group. In fact, few were more insulting or
dismissive.
“Bemused,” I say, because the data was utterly
clear. Looked at closely, this, in a
nutshell, was how life worked. How it
always would work during a life which I hoped — like all others — would last a
good many years. Equally clear, most of
the rest of the world was blissfully unconscious of the collection of traits it
exhibited that assured that this would remain unchanged.
Desperation to learn the behavior I’ve just described —
or to mimic it — led to a poorly constructed patchwork of ideas not so much
received as clung to. Just one of those
ideas (a comparatively minor one, for sure) was that W. S. Merwin was an
insidious pied piper of poetry. Vast
numbers of young poets were being lured to their doom. It was easy to adopt. Everyone who valued poetry at all — populist
to formalist and all variations between —
was agreed in that particular, it seemed.
Even major poets in whose light I would bask now and again scowled when
the name Merwin was mentioned in their presence.
The journey from befuddled to bemused proved to be a
journey to the wrong destination. Alpha-dominant
members of groups do not require bemusement.
In fact, bemusement is among the most worrisome of possible reactions. Even if the bemused person scowls and derides
the poetry of Merwin on cue.
Eventually I found myself with gratifying amounts of time
to spend sunny spring days wistfully reading poetry again. Alone.
As I did, the light seemed attenuated and the world slowly and
inevitably crumbling. It was only a
matter of pure chance that my natural emotional response to being cast out had synched-up
with the world actually slowly and inevitably crumbling.
It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender
to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time. I wished I’d been prepared to read him years
ago. I reprint my review, here, in
memory of his death this past March 15.
W. S. Merwin's Migration: New and Selected Poems
contains eight new poems in its 552 pages. They are simple, playful and
thematically continuous with the work that goes before. That said; there are
reasons that Merwin's poetry flourishes in the "new and selected"
format more than most. The road from his Yale Younger winning first volume, A
Mask for Janus (1952), to these new poems, in which the poet's
"ancient, glittering eyes are gay," is a long and an unusually
diverse one.
Commentators on Merwin's poetry have often waxed ambivalent
or worse. The early work was highly formal, the moment clearly transitional,
and the poet seemed to drag his feet against his presumed responsibility to
keep up with the times. Even after the poems were no longer formal they continued to
sound formal.
The worst of the poet's offenses were his quantifiable
rhythms and an obviousness of influence. As Richard Howard would later put it,
assessing Merwin's early work, in Alone With America (1969), "Echoes
of other writers are indulged...".
In the essay "Diminishing Returns" (1974) the
critic James Atlas would complain of the early poems'
ornate, peculiar diction, an absence of all qualities
distinguishing the modern, a derivative, self-conscious voice.
Perhaps it was the debt that poems such as "Burning the
Cat" and "The Hotel-Keepers" owed to Frost, and that so many
owed to Yeats (and indirectly to Pound) that went beyond the pale.
These comments reflect aesthetics that were already
achieving dominance as Merwin's first volumes were being published. The Black
Mountain College movement, intimately related as it was to the even more
influential Bauhaus, discouraged any hint of the decorative, of style. At Black
Mountain, creative learning was encouraged by unstructured teaching methods.
The result was a considerably less structured art and text. Upon the effective
demise of Black Mountain, the departure of poetry instructor Robert Creeley to
San Francisco actually amplified its influence by injecting it into the Beat
movement and the wider San Francisco Renaissance. The first writing programs
were also coming into prominence under the influence of Paul Engle's Iowa
Writers' Workshop. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of Engle's
plain-language aesthetic in the decades following World War II. The pressure
from these and other directions to consider formalism as entirely outmoded was
pervasive and immense.
On the other side of the ledger, W.H. Auden's 10+ years
selecting the winners of the Yale Younger Poets Series made it far and away the
premiere prize for a first book. Auden was himself an enormous figure in the
poetry world and a staunch believer in traditional craftsmanship. From 1948-59
the winners of the Yale Younger Award tended to begin as fine traditional
craftsmen supported by the poetry "establishment" and to be faced
with the prospect of having their future volumes ignored outside of a small but
elite coterie or still more overtly dismissed. As a result, radical conversion
was the rule among these poets rather than the exception.
Whether in response to this critical undertow or in the
normal course of his development, "The Crossroads of the World Etc."
marked Merwin's transition to an almost surrealistic style. This and other poems
in The Moving Target (1963) were sparsely punctuated, if at all. They
were even considered revolutionary in some ways, few American readers then
being familiar with the French surrealist poets Louis Aragon and Rene Char.
Yet a niggling dissatisfaction of many of his more august
contemporaries continued in evidence long after he left off all overt traces of
formalism. Two sources, in particular, remained for it. James Dickey summed up
the first objection in an early piece on Merwin first published in 1961, and
collected in Babel to Byzantium (1968):
What [he] has lacked up to now, and still lacks, is
intensity, some vital ingress into the event of the poem which would cause him
to lose his way among the intricacies of what is so easy for him to say concerning
almost anything on earth...
In an age when poetry is all but entirely identified with
Dionysian involvement Merwin is, by inclination, Apollonian, mediate. He rarely
attempts to be so much as urgent:
I keep finding this letter
To the gods of abandon,
Tearing it up."
The second source of frustration was Merwin's insistence
upon the perversity of human nature and its constructs. His name has been
coupled with Eliot and Beckett in this regard: "He is one of the voices
singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells," Helen Vendler avers,
in a review of The Carrier of Ladders (1970), “and if the toneless cry
of the Waste Land is one of your affinities, you will find it in Merwin.
“
Ours is also an age in which poetry is expected to redeem
the common man from centuries of elitist misrepresentation. In such an
idealistic environment, Merwin could only be perceived by some to be a closet
misanthrope, or, at best, pathologically morbid.
This marked ambivalence notwithstanding, Merwin's volume The
Carrier of Ladders won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize and his poetry dominated the
next decade. Many more volumes (and awards) followed, and, although no single
transitional poem or volume can be cited, his work has gradually come to
feature nature. His descriptions of human nature have become steadily more
sympathetic, at times even to the point of indulgence. The heavy enjambment he
had long utilized in order to force the reader to pay close attention to the
text has given way to generally end-stopped lines.
In The River Sound (1999), Merwin returned to rhyme
while continuing without punctuation or capitalization. The rhyme is often
imperfect and the line lengths are irregular in an attempt to maintain the
requisite conversational tone.
Amidst all of these changes resides a continuity that is
even more to the point. From the eccentric early Biblical references, to the
late wistful surrender of the body, Migration reveals an attempt to
pursue a spiritual journey that will not seem ridiculous in the context of the times.
The Buddhist/Taoist concept of "the path," which suffuses so many of
these poems, has resulted in a progression of images developing the metaphor of
time as a physical landscape through which we pass. It has also provoked
meditations on the nature of the human will, deftly explored in lines such as
these, from "The Trail into Kansas," where will hardly seems will and
fate hardly fate:
we have been guided from scattered
wombs
all the way here choosing choosing
which foot to put down
There is a persistent dissociative quality that evolves
within W. S. Merwin's poetry, corollary of his many exercises intended to
overcome the traditional identification of self. With
I take down from the door
My story with the holes
For the arms the face the vitals
mind-body duality takes on decidedly extra-Cartesian
implications. In various poems, body parts become foreign and take on lives of
their own. Of his habits Merwin reports that
Even in the middle of the night
they go handing me around
as if they were embarrassing companions he can never seem to
get away from. In a later poem starlight brings us our "words / traveling
towards us even in our sleep." Even our utterances have a life apart from
us; more to the point, we are both less and more than our western egos take us
for. The search for just who exactly me is slowly reveals itself to the
reader to be the dominant theme of this lifetime of poetry.
Migration tells the story of a long and unusually
fruitful journey. With a bit of context it is also a kind of documentary
history of an unusually talented poet seeking ways to come to terms with the
times in which he lives while maintaining the integrity of his personal vision.
Wise enough not to make the mistake of an intractability that would exile him
to a peripheral existence, Merwin nevertheless could not choose to follow the
road signs and to be pleased to count the accumulation of flyleaves from which
his face would beam out as a result. A strong climber would rather fail at a
cliff than conquer a hill. In the end he graced the flyleaves anyway.
These are poems that often contradicted received ideas — many
of which persist — about how poetry should be written in the post-modern world,
and the reader may experience some frustration, as a result. The ambivalence of
Merwin's better critics highlights differences with which his readers are
called to struggle. When he gave up traditional forms, Merwin surrendered the
myths of order, narrative line, and heroism that went with them. This provided
those critics little relief, however, as he chose not to replace them with the
prevailing myths of our own times.
Altogether without its myths, humankind was bound to make a
paltry figure. This was not misanthropy, however, but the first step of a
journey, provisioned with little more than a wealth of language and
observational skills the poet had acquired during his extended apprenticeship,
toward wherever his next step would take him. The result is a seductively
luxurious vagabond poetry that slowly accumulates style and theme from out of
the poet's personality (the only constant in its landscape); a poetry of
uncomfortable and unquestionable excellence.
An earlier version of this essay first appeared at
Eclectica Magazine.
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