W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwinis an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands' rainforests...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 September 1927
CountryUnited States of America
The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in.
Utterance" Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.
We are the echo of the future.
I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward'... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid.
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been