The Man Who Planted Poems: A Profile of W.S. Merwin

In the rainforests of Maui, there was a house built on the rim of a dormant volcano, surrounded by thousands of palm trees. They were not there by accident. They were planted, one by one, by a man who believed that the act of restoration—whether of a damaged forest or a damaged language—was the highest form of art. That man was W.S. Merwin.

William Stanley Merwin, born in 1927, was a poet of profound spiritual presence and one of the most significant literary figures of the last century. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he began his writing life as a child composing hymns for his father. This early exposure to the reverent and the sacred never left him, though his style underwent a radical transformation that would change the landscape of American poetry.

The Architect of Silence

Merwin’s career is often told as a story of two poets. The first was a technical virtuoso, a young formalist who dazzled critics with his mastery of myth and meter in books like A Mask for Janus (1952). But in the mid-1960s, something shifted. Merwin felt that traditional punctuation—the commas and periods that organize our thought—was like "stapling the poem to the page." He wanted a poetry that moved as breath does: continuous, uninhibited, and alive.

With the publication of The Lice in 1967, he abandoned punctuation entirely. The result was a haunting, open style where silence became as important as speech. His lines float on the page, untethered by grammatical markers, forcing the reader to slow down and listen to the ghostly resonance of the words. This innovation didn't just strip away ink; it stripped away the certainty of the modern world, leaving behind a voice that felt ancient, impersonal, and prophetic.

Voices from the Shadows

To understand this style, you must hear it. In his poem "The Asians Dying," written during the Vietnam War, Merwin uses this unpunctuated form to create a nightmare of erasure and loss. The images pile up, stark and undeniable:

"When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight"

Critically, Merwin was hailed as "enigmatic" and "distant," yet his distance was not an act of coldness. It was a way of stepping back to see the whole picture—the human species as just one fleeting part of a vast, ecological web. His work earned him nearly every major accolade, including two Pulitzer Prizes (for The Carrier of Ladders and The Shadow of Sirius) and the National Book Award.

A Life of Distinct Turns

Merwin's life was as principled as his poetry. He famously donated the prize money from his 1971 Pulitzer to the draft resistance movement, a gesture that angered the literary establishment but cemented his reputation as a poet of conscience. In the late 70s, he moved to Hawaii to study Zen Buddhism and purchased a ruined pineapple plantation. Over decades, he and his wife Paula restored the land, planting over 2,700 palm trees and turning a wasteland into a lush conservatory. He often said he wanted to restore the rain to the earth, just as he wanted to restore a sense of the sacred to language.

Where to Begin

If you are new to Merwin, do not start with his longest books. Start with a single, perfect lyric: "For the Anniversary of My Death."

It is the ideal entry point because it bridges his two worlds: the personal meditation and the universal mystery. It invites you to think about a date that exists on the calendar but is currently invisible to you. Here is a verbatim excerpt:

"Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star"

Notice the capitalization at the start of each line—a vestige of formality—but the total absence of stops. It flows like a thought you cannot interrupt.

For a shorter glimpse into his genius, read "Separation." It is only three lines long, yet it remains one of the most famous poems about loss in the English language:

"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color"

W.S. Merwin died in 2019, but he left behind a forest of words and a forest of trees, both standing as testaments to a life of deep, attentive listening. To read him is to enter a quiet room where the only thing that matters is the truth.