SOURCE: Vogelsang, John. “Toward the Great Language: W. S. Merwin.” Modern Poetry Studies 3, no. 3 (1972): 97-118.

In the following essay, Vogelsang analyzes Merwin's treatment of the dichotomies between words and the objects they represent, and between man and the divine.

The early poetry of W. S. Merwin finds the poet caught in a dichotomy of “here” and “there.” The “here” is the feeling of a split and distance between words and the objects they signify, between meaning and activity, and between a sense of self as an entity and as an active participant in the creative process of the world. It is the emptiness within—the sense of lack and the desire for fulfilment, as it is faced with the silence without—the world that is tacitly felt to be there and is the source of experience but is beyond the words that the self projects onto it. The...