W(illiam) S(tanley) Merwin was born in New York City and raised in Union
City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was educated in Princeton
University, where he studied with the poets John Berryman and R. P. Blackmur.
He later traveled through Europe, and in Mallorca, Spain, was a tutor to the
poet Robert Grave's son. For several years he worked as a translator at the
BBC in London, and from 1951 until 1953 he was poetry editor at _The Nation_.
He has since lived in, among other places, Mexico and France, and currently
resides in Hawaii. In addition to poetry, Merwin has written several plays,
and has translated Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese poetry
into English. His early work relied heavily on legend and mythology, and it
demonstrated his virtuosity with difficult meters and forms. He has since moved
to an autobiographical mode and a freer style; these poems eschew punctuation
and capitalization and divided lines into phrases that approximate breaths.