SOURCE: "An Old Master and Four New Poets," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLI, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 729-36.

In the following excerpt, Jarman assesses Selected Poems and The Rain in the Trees, noting Merwin's concern with ecological themes.

Like many readers of my generation, I first became aware of W. S. Merwin's poetry after he had perfected the radical change in style that led to The Moving Target and The Lice. Reading Richard Howard's essay on Merwin's poetry in Alone with America led me to the first four books, A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, and The Drunk in the Furnace. That Merwin was a master of traditional forms, as demonstrated in those books, was as exciting a revelation as the departures of the subsequent books which in their many editions (The Lice has gone into something like seventeen printings) have made him famous...