University Press of Mississippi Conversations with W. S. Merwin (Literary Conversations Series)

Conversations with W.S. Merwin is the first collection of interviews with former U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin. Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as the early influences on Merwin of Robert Graves and Ezra Pound, his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, his extraordinary work as a translator, as well as his decades-long interest in environmental conservation. Anticipating the current sustainability movement and the debates surrounding major and minor literatures, Merwin was, and still is, a visionary ahead of his time at the beginning of the 21st century. At age 88, William Stanley Merwin is among the most distinguished poets, translators, and thinkers in the United States. A major link between the period of literary modernism and its contemporary extensions, Merwin has been a major voice in American letters for close to eight decades, and his translations from the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and others, have earned him unanimous praise and admiration. Merwin has also been on the forefront of the environmental movement and articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability long before they became fashionable. Now, for the first time, Conversations with W. S. Merwin offers insight into the various dimensions of Merwin's thought by treating his interviews as a self-standing category in his oeuvre. More than casual narratives of contiguity interpreting, en passant, the occasional poem or relaying an occasional experience, they afford literary and cultural historians a view into the larger through-lines of Merwin's thinking. Like many poets aware of literary tradition and cultural ferment, Merwin sees his work in conversation with the larger developments of his time(s) and with the writers that have preceded and parallel him. In the aggregate, these interviews allow for a reconstruction of his literary and cultural roots-stations in the making of a writer and thinker, activist and ecologist, and indeed poète-philosophe. Conversations with W.S. Merwin will be an indispensable resource for readers and scholars for decades to come.