Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Paperback)

W. S. Merwin had a harsh childhood. He was raised very strictly in a Presbyterian rectory in New Jersey, then in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Princeton in 1947 as a scholarship student: "He was a kind of prodigy," recalls Galway Kinnell, a Princeton classmate, "writing poetry that was so incredibly resonant." After college, Merwin traveled extensively in Europe, including a period of tutoring Robert Graves's children on the island of Majorca. He went finally to the south of France, where he spent several years. In 1952 he received the Yale Younger Poets Award, and in 1970 he won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Carrier of Ladders". In 1975 he settled in Hawaii, where he has maintained a miniature forest of trees and plants of endangered species. Merwin has made a name for himself not only as a poet and translator, but as an environmentalist; ever since his first book, "Death of a Naturalist", in 1966, he has written vividly about landscape and nature. He has also written several books of prose, including his memoir, "The Lost Upland", published in 1992, about the ancient farming culture of the Dordogne, where he lived 30 years before. Merwin is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has had several wives, but no children: "I've never had a desire for children," he says. "I'm very sort of egotistical and impatient."