W.S. Merwin
American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize twice and served as Poet Laureate. His early formal work gave way to a punctuation-free style in The Lice, responding to the Vietnam War.
Works
- A Mask for JanusEarly formal poems on mythology and classical tradition
- The Moving TargetElegiac poems exploring loss, transformation, and absence
- The LiceSpare, austere poems on apocalypse, emptiness, and spiritual desolation
- The Carrier of LaddersPoems balancing poetic craft with spiritual reaching and unknowing
- The Shadow of SiriusLate poems on age, mortality, and glimpses of transcendence