The Poet in the Natural World: Dissolving Epiphanies in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin

Abstract

Abstract:

Merwin was a Buddhist, and aspects of Buddhism and transcendental Romanticism mingle in his nature poetry. His poems are fundamentally Romantic but differ in two ways. Coleridge suggests in The Friend that we choose to feel alienated because "we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought" (520). For Merwin that antithesis is instead an unavoidable consequence of writing, and it occasions a sense of alienation that enters the poem and nudges aside the feeling of relatedness he cherishes.