W. S. Merwin and the Nothing That Is

Abstract

Of the immortal in Blue Merwin writes, There is no pity in him. Where would he have learned it?' Colder than any of his contemporaries, the poet himself seems to aspire to such supernatural neutrality. Even more than the glacial Wallace Stevens he has actually achieved what Stevens called mind of winter,2 not simply in order to behold Nothing, but to describe human emptiness with the chill accuracy it deserves. And in a time of apocalyptic poetry no one else confronts the End with such inhuman calm, such studious avoidance of fear or exultation. Even when Merwin seems to welcome the apocalypse he does so in a minor key, quietly; his recent poetry is dominated by undertones. At first his voice was not quite so muted, nor his preoccupations so consistently grim. Though always drawn to the empty places of the imagination, Merwin wrote, as late as The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), about a variety of things in an impressive variety of tones. But in the series of volumes he has published since The Moving