SOURCE: Folsom, L. Edwin. “Approaches and Removals: W. S. Merwin's Encounter with Whitman's America.” Shenandoah 29, no. 3 (spring 1978): 57-73.

In the following essay, Folsom examines what he regards as Merwin's obsession with the “meaning of America” as well as his response to Walt Whitman's characterization of it.

W. S. Merwin on being an American poet:

I have sometimes puzzled over the possibility of being an American poet (But what else could I be—I've never wanted to be anything else) and certainly the search for a way of writing about what America is, in my lifetime, is a perennial siren. But not, I think, in any way that's obviously Whitmanesque.¹

Merwin's poetry, to be sure, is not Whitmanesque, but, like Whitman, Merwin has been obsessed with the meaning of America. His poetry, especially The Lice and the American sequence² in The Carrier of Ladders, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly...