Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.
In his poetry, W. S. Merwin draws on Buddhist philosophy and its profound respect for the inherent worth of all living things. As The Atlantic’s then-poetry editor Peter Davison wrote in 1997, the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate
Audrey McAvoy / AP
… is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. … The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and underground.
From our February 1995 issue, his poem “Green Fields”:
Peter with his gaunt cheeks and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence Peter who had lived on from another time and country and who had seen so many things set out and vanish still believed in heaven and said he had never once doubted it since his childhood on the farm
Read the full poem here, and go here to explore the language and landscapes of some of his other work.
