"One Story" by W.S. Merwin

One in an edition of 250 copies, originally printed in The Nation June 1989.

This item is framed

16" x 22.5"

William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His numerous collections of poetry, his translations, and his books of prose have won praise over seven decades.

He won nearly every award available to an American poet, and he was named U.S. poet laureate twice. A practicing Buddhist as well as a proponent of deep ecology, Merwin lived since the late 1970s on an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii which he has painstakingly restored to its original rainforest state.

His first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus (1952), was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. While that first book reflected the formalism of the period, Merwin eventually became known for an impersonal, indirect, and open style that eschewed punctuation.

Although Merwin's writing has undergone stylistic changes through the course of his career, a recurring theme is man's separation from nature. The poet saw the consequences of that alienation as disastrous, both for the human race and for the rest of the world. Merwin has continued to win high praise for his poetry, however, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Shadow of Sirius (2008).

In addition to writing poetry, prose and drama, Merwin is an accomplished and prolific translator of poetry. He has also been awarded fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Merwin is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and two-time U.S. poet laureate (1999-2000, 2010-2011).

Merwin died in March 2019 at the age of 91.