Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
Defender of the Earth
By Helen Vendler
The Shadow of Sirius
by W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press, 117 pp., $22.00
The American poets born in 1926 and 1927 formed a remarkable generation that included A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. These poets were a disparate group: Ammons the prophetic ecologist, Merrill the lyric perfectionist, Creeley the fastidious minimalist, Ginsberg the political poet, O'Hara the quotidian comic, Wright the sad mourner, and Ashbery the wry omnivore. And then Merwin. When W.H. Auden named him the Yale Younger Poet in 1952, he was writing Audenesque lines—these, for instance, from an eighty-line stanzaic masque presaging a deluge:
Review, 3328 words
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