W.S. Merwin as an Influential Writer of Poetry and Prose
Emergence
At the day's end
all our footsteps are added up
to see how near.
W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin is an award-winning author of a wide variety of both poetry and prose books. He has served as a tremendous influence to me and has helped guide me along my writing journey. He inspires my best writing and has helped to shape my stylistics. I seek to follow in the footsteps of perhaps one of the most well known and popular poets of this century.
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, as well as Scranton, Pennsylvania (Merwin, Selected 279). From 1949 to 1951, Merwin was a world traveler, as he worked as a tutor in Portugal, France, and Majorca (Merwin, Selected 279). In addition to writing poetry, Merwin also wrote articles for The Nation as well as radio scripts for the BBC (Merwin, Selected 279). One of his most famous poetry books, The Carrier of Ladders, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 (Merwin, Selected 279). In addition to his books of poetry, he published three books of prose: The Miner's Pale Children, Houses and Travelers, and Unframed Originals. Merwin received many outstanding awards in his career including The Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets in 1974, and the Governor's Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii (Merwin, Selected 279).
Merwin's writing style is unique from many other professional writers. "Merwin has been committed faithfully to the energies of fragmentation, erasure, and all those energies we identify as negative" ("Boston Review" 1). Because Merwin is able to use this technique so effectively, I attempt to follow in his footsteps and try some of it out on my own. Rick Jones and I used this idea in our collaborative poem, "pierced existence," in which we did not use proper capitalization or follow some of the most basic rules English rules. When I write in this style, I feel more relaxed because I do not have to be concerned with grammar and spelling. I am better able to concentrate on imagery and the use of words.
Merwin's magisterial control of lyric syntax and narrative order give the reader no difficulty; they are able to understand his work since it flows free from form ("Boston Review" 1). "The consistency, the inclusive and transforming vitality of the work makes it the crowning achievement of Merwin's long and extremely diversified career" ("Boston Review" 1).
Poetry and Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 9nd ed. New York: Longman, 2005. Pgs 389-392
Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity.
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Therefore , Day’s ‘The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender’ and Duffy’s poem ‘Stealing’ indicate how the creation of distinctive voices in texts are crucial. Both texts exhibit how composers are able to shape and affect the individual through significant life experiences.
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1c. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print. The.
Even though the speakers are identified as the authors, they can more accurately be described as characters based on themselves. We know that this type of lyric was most likely performed in front of an audience probably set to music. The public’s relationship to such work can be likened with dramatic performance of today such as a musical or a...
Meinke, Peter. “Untitled” Poetry: An Introduction. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s 2010. 89. Print
Early American History is not necessarily in my comfort zone in regards to the amount of knowledge I can share off the top of my head. Facing East was the best book for me to start with, I feel, because it affected my ideas about the ways in which Historians have written about conflict between Native Americans and European settlers. The only perspective I have ever read has been a westward-facing perspective. I was almost ashamed at how surprised I was that I had not considered the fact that conflict and distrust existed in North America long before non-natives arrived, rather than what I believe is often portrayed as this harmonious network of Native American tribes who slowly succumbed to encroachment by settlers. The rivalries and wars that exi...
The two-line struggle which broke between Mao Zedong’s promotion of socialism and his opponents’ lapsed into revisionism. The designation of Liu Shaoqi with the dominant authority was an assertion that consensus had diminished over a variety of issues, including the economy and ‘spontaneous developments towards capitalism’ in the countryside. The party was accused of having become ‘divorced from the masses’ and education thrived of ‘bourgeois individualism’. The struggle between the Soviet Union and China was escalating, in which a split seemed to be inevitable. Mao as a result attempted to spur China’s independent economic development through the Great Leap Forward. Hence the social violence of the Revolution was caused by the incoherence of pre-Cultural Revolution political system as explained by Richard Kraus, “Maoism itself was embodied in the paradox that Mao wanted people to act voluntarily exactly as he wanted them to, without quite trusting they would do so.” Shifting from this political argument, Lynn T. White III interpreted the Cultural Revolution as an unintended result of administrative policies, claiming the campaigning, controlling and labelling of such swayed students’ attitudes towards each other and their leaders, hence seen as merely the long term cost of these
There are several reasons for Mao call for the Cultural Revolution, as the situation at that moment is full of bourgeoisie thought, the free market policies implemented by Liu and also the ideological different with Krushchev, all these factors make Mao wanted to safeguard the purity of the Communist Revolution. Furthermore, he also wanted to remove Liu and find his own successor through this mass movement.
Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. 3rd ed. Ed. Helen Vendler. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
Poemhunter Inc., n.d. Web. The Web. The Web. 4 Dec. 2013. Davis, Arthur P. “Hughes.”
113- The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. of the book. Vol.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.