SOURCE: Contoski, Victor. “W. S. Merwin: Rational and Irrational Poetry.” Literary Review 22, no. 3 (spring 1979): 309-20.

In the following essay, Contoski disagrees with the critical opinion that Merwin's later works are obscure, suggesting instead that the poems are difficult to analyze because of Merwin's use of unfamiliar literary traditions.

In discussions of the later poetry of W. S. Merwin, there seems to be critical agreement on two points: 1. its obscurity; 2. its refusal to yield its meaning in paraphrase. Most criticism of Merwin has therefore avoided detailed analysis of his difficult poems, contenting itself with more general approaches to the work as a whole, since Merwin's later work would appear to fit Archibald MacLeish's formula (which works particularly well for bad poetry): “A poem should not mean / But be.”

It is the thesis of this essay, however, that Merwin's best later work not only is but means; that though the...