威廉·斯坦利·默温传记

诗人的传记

威廉·斯坦利·默温(生于1927年9月30日)是一位美国诗人。他在20世纪60年代以反战诗人的身份而闻名。后来，他向神话主题发展，形成了一种独特的诗歌，其特点是间接叙述和没有标点符号。在八九十年代，默文对佛教哲学和深层生态学的兴趣也影响了他的写作。他继续大量写作，尽管他也花了大量时间在夏威夷的热带雨林恢复上，他现在住在那里。默文获得了许多荣誉，包括普利策诗歌奖(1971年和2009年)和坦宁奖，这是美国诗人学会授予的最高荣誉之一，以及斯特鲁加诗歌之夜的金花环。1952年，默文的第一本诗集《雅努斯的面具》在《耶鲁青年诗人丛书》中出版。w·h·奥登之所以选择这部作品，就是因为它与众不同。后来，在1971年，奥登和默温在《纽约书评》上互怼。默文在1971年6月3日的《纽约书评》上发表了一篇题为《论获得普利策奖》的文章，概述了他对越南战争的反对意见，并表示他将把奖金捐给抵抗运动。 Auden responded in his letter "Saying No" published in the July 1, 1971 issue stating that the Pulitzer Prize jury was not a political body with any ties to the American foreign policy. From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works) he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Italian and Latin poetry, including Dante's Purgatorio. Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiian history and legend. Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of William Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic. In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes. In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal. Migration (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A life-long friend of James Wright, Merwin's elegy to him appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.