SOURCE: Frazier, Jane. “Writing outside the Self: The Disembodied Narrators of W. S. Merwin.” Style: Rhetoric and Poetics 30, no. 2 (summer 1996): 341-50.

In the following essay, Frazier explores the almost disembodied character of many of Merwin's narrators and suggests that the poet uses them in order to tell a story without the burden of ego.

The search for an original, natural world—or origin—is perhaps the single most distinct topic to be found in the poetry of W. S. Merwin since the The Carrier of Ladders (1970). To achieve the participation in nature that they desire, Merwin's narrators betray little or no personal identity and often seem as if they are voices speaking free of the body. These “disembodied” narrators lack a particular self so that they may make their quests without the burdens of the ego. In the vast majority of Merwin's poems, their actions remain part of...