W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin was an American poet and translator whose work spanned more than six decades and returned again and again to nature, memory, language and the loss of wild places. Born in New York City, he studied at Princeton University and spent several years in Europe, where he worked as a tutor and made much of his living translating poetry from French, Spanish, Latin and Portuguese.

His first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Later collections include Green with Beasts (1956), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970), The Rain in the Trees (1988) and The Moon Before Morning (2014). Migration: New and Selected Poems (2005) won the National Book Award for Poetry, and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His translations include Dante's Purgatorio and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Merwin served twice as United States Poet Laureate. In 1976 he moved to Maui, Hawaii, where he spent decades restoring a former pineapple plantation as a palm forest. He died there in 2019.