Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy

Abstract

AbstractMerwin’s efforts to conserve Earth help us understand his recuperation of poetic form in the later poetry. After deploying traditional poetic devices such as meter and rhyme to voice the ideology he opposed in his middle period, Merwin came to renew traditional form to echo his commitment to preindustrial human symbiosis with the environment—an indigenous consilience. Merwin understood literary adaptation through translation as rooted in a selfless ethics of stewardship. In this renewal, Merwin was never sanguine about salvation through traditional forms of writing or living but remained elegiac in his love and care for what is disappearing from our ecosystems.