A Poet and Nothing But a Poet

The Princeton Alumni Weekly catches up with poet W.S. Merwin.

From the piece...

Gentle, fiercely intelligent, and quick to laugh, Merwin, now 82, is willing to lead a conversation about his life and his writing through loops and digressions for hours. As a young child in working-class Union City, N.J., during the Great Depression, he found comfort in gazing at the Hudson River. A few times he accompanied his father, who could be distant and punitive, to study in the church where he was a Presbyterian minister, and young Merwin gazed through the window at the river, with the ferries and freighters passing by. He was, he writes in his 2005 memoir Summer Doorways, “utterly rapt in the vast scene out in front of me ... Whole trains were crossing the river on railroad ferries, all shades of orange in the sunlight. White puffs of steam climbed out of unseen whistles and horns, the distant sounds arriving, faint and faded, a long breath afterward. I was seeing something that I could not reach and that would never go away.” His love of the water would remain, fueling a desire to ­travel as well as a tug toward the author and mariner Joseph Conrad.

Merwin was moved by the rhymes and rhythm of the hymns in his father’s church, first in Union City and then in Scranton, Pa. He delighted in the poetry that his mother read aloud. For Merwin, poetry was first an aural sensation, and to this day he has a strong sense of the music of a poem and believes that a poem must be read aloud to be truly understood. The young boy began writing poems himself — “atrocious poetry, as children do,” he says of his earliest efforts — but he kept at it through adolescence.