Merwin ’48: U.S. Poet Laureate

“I’ll read a poem over and over,” W.S. Merwin ’48 said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “If you love it, read it everyday. It gets deeper. Poetry should wake up and touch parts of you that you never knew were there.”

Merwin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was named the nation’s 17th poet laureate on July 1.

“I was honored and I’m happy to see what I can do,” Merwin said of his appointment, in which he will serve a one-year term and seek to promote national appreciation of poetry. “The audience of poetry is new every year. The most important thing would be if parents got to read to their children. Reading poetry is not the same as reading fiction. Poetry never gets out of their heads. It isn’t prose. Poetry isn’t read for the same reasons. It begins not with understanding, but with hearing.”

At age 82, Merwin lives in Hawaii and has authored more than 30 books of prose and poetry. He stopped using punctuation in his work in the 1960s, once saying, “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page ... I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”

English professor emeritus Edmund Keeley ’48, who was “very close” to Merwin when they were undergraduates and called him to congratulate him on the honor, said, “I thought it was long overdue, but I wasn’t surprised. He should have won it a long time ago.”

But for Merwin, the appointment came at the appropriate time. “I’ve always said I didn’t want to do it before, but now I’m old enough,” he said, adding, “It’s a big trip to go from Hawaii. The trips really take time and I don’t know what to do for time as it is. There isn’t time to do all the things I want to do.”

Creative writing professor Paul Muldoon said he believes poet laureate is a position to which Merwin is “well suited.”

“He is functional not only as a writer, but as a reader,” Muldoon said. “He happens to be a poet who, unlike many in the last 50 years, did not get involved in a University career of teaching poetry.”

As an English major at Princeton, Merwin studied with poet John Berryman and critic R.P. Blackmur, authoring a senior thesis titled “John Donne and the Metaphysical Tradition.”

Keeley explained that Merwin, like his friend and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Galway Kinnell ’48, was already an accomplished poet by the time he graduated from the University. “He sticks to what he believes in regarding how he lives and operates,” Keeley said. “He always stuck to his principles. He didn’t give in to commercial temptation ... He’ll contribute because he’s sensitive — sensitive to the respect writers ought to have.”

Merwin on life at Princeton, becoming a poet and finding inspiration

A: When I was five years old, my mother read poems. My father was a minister, but I didn’t have much to do with “church-y” things. I like the Bible — then I was reading the King James version, especially psalms. I was fascinated by listening to them. During a sermon, I’d draw pictures to go with psalms and prophets. It’s about the hearing, not the doctrine. Many psalms are wonderful — really beautiful — in the King James version.

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By the time I got to college at 16, I realized that’s what I really wanted to do. Friends were talking about careers. I wasn’t thinking about careers, just writing. Living? I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I was interested in Shelley, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare. I didn’t have much money. I lived hand-to-mouth some years and most of the time on very little.

Q: What did you study at Princeton?

A: I started in engineering. I had wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, but was too young. That idea died after three or four months — I wanted no part of organized violence. I was interested in history, though really in biography. I majored in English and my graduate work was in modern languages, also at Princeton.

I knew poetry would be the center of my life. I didn’t want to live in a situation where I would take a job, drop it, take another job, go somewhere else. I didn’t mind moving, but I wanted to live in places, not situations.

Q: What was life at Princeton like?

A: You wouldn’t recognize it. There were no girls and it wasn’t so easy to see them. Almost everybody was in the service. There weren’t as many buildings on campus. The library’s corner had a park with cypress trees — bulldozers came and built that library. Washington Road to Kingston was abandoned farmland and woods. I found a dozen or so horses by the stadium. An old jockey was at the stables and gave me the key to the stables at any hour. I think I spent as much time on horseback as in the classroom.

Q: How do you remember your college experience?

A: I was there on scholarship. There were a lot of rich boys, but most of my friends were on scholarship. I think we went only once to New York, and we would hitchhike. We weren’t interested in the rich and the rich weren’t interested in us. We stuck to our friends. I guess we were considered nerdy.

Q: Can poetry be studied in college?

A: I think it can be and should be. The study shouldn’t get in the way of the poetry. It’s not about interpretation. If you love it, you can talk for years about it. If you don’t love it, you’ll kill it.

Moments of feeling get more wonderful and more powerful all the time. If you’re not able to see them, you’re not getting them. That’s true of all arts — music, painting, ballet — they’re understood by being felt.

A: Find out what you want to do. You don’t want to get to be 40 having not chosen what you want to do and find yourself up a street you don’t want to be in.

A: I never thought about it all my life. I’ve been happy for those chosen if I admired them. I read as much as I can. It’s for the pleasure of it. It opens you up. That comes from following what you love. Whether writing all your life or what, always be yourself. You can never be good enough at being yourself.

A: In the world around me. I listen to everything. Time, early in the morning by myself, may be something.

A: Read it and find out. I can’t tell you that. I don’t have any theories.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Christina Henricks.