When W.S. Merwin received his first Pulitzer Prize, he refused to take the financial reward. “I am too conscious of being an American,” wrote the poet, “to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.”
It was 1971, during the Vietnam War, and Merwin asked that the prize money go to two recipients: the Draft Resistance, and Alan Blanchard, an artist who was blinded by a police weapon in Berkeley, Calif., while watching from a distance as a riot erupted over a park.
The beneficiaries represented Merwin’s two great loves: nature and pacifism. The celebrated American poet, who died last week at age 91, spent his life pursuing both.
Over the course of his career, Merwin wrote more than two dozen volumes of poetry, as well as many works of prose and translation. He was the United States poet laureate from 2010 to 2011 and twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Merwin developed his devotion to nature, a continual subject in his writing, as a child. He learned to read, he told the Paris Review, by deciphering the captions in a book about American Indians.
Merwin’s love of language connected with his fascination with a culture’s love of nature, and he began to fear that the world around him didn’t treat the environment with the same reverence. He developed a desire to write of the space beyond by sidewalks and cement.
“It was an urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed,” he told the Paris Review. He spent the last 40 years of his life restoring a former pineapple farm in Hawaii.
The son of a Presbyterian minister who could be stern and severe, Merwin had an upbringing that instilled in him both a desire for peace and a deep religious consciousness, which evolved as he later became Buddhist. In one of his Vietnam poems, “The Asians Dying,” Merwin wrote of the casualties of war: “Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead / Again again with its pointless sound / When the moon finds them they are the color of everything.”
Many of his poems exuded bleakness, pessimism, and an aridness enforced by their lack of punctuation. But despite his writing that “wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest,” some of his poems revealed optimism. Merwin wrote often of spring, of warmth and changing seasons.
Without knowing it, he prepared for his death with a poem, “For the Anniversary of My Death,” about the mid-March day he would die.
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth.
Merwin always guarded his curiosity, and as he wrote of the natural world, he may have continued to be surprised at earth. But he was no stranger to it.
