SOURCE: Bowers, Neal. “W. S. Merwin and Postmodern American Poetry.” Sewanee Review 98, no. 2 (spring 1990): 246-59.

In the following essay, Bowers suggests that Merwin's poetry may pose difficulty for critics because they fail to view his work in the context of postmodernism.

When W. S. Merwin's¹ first book appeared in 1952, literary taxonomists had no trouble classifying it. W. H. Auden, who selected the volume as that year's Yale poetry prize-winner and wrote a preface for it, led the way, commenting on Merwin's respect for the “traditions of poetic craftsmanship” and identifying the young poet as an inheritor of the universal mythic tradition. In fact Auden went so far as to distinguish Merwin's work from the “I”-dominated “occasional” poetry of the age, thereby lending his authority to the classification process; so things seemed neatly settled. A new poet had arrived on the scene and been quickly conscripted into the...