[Wakoski is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt, she comments on Selected Poems, noting thematic similarities between the poetry of Merwin and Walt Whitman.]

There is no need to go outside Merwin's Selected Poems, but I would advise those who are not already devotees to start at the back of this book and work forward, since Merwin has bravely put his early work (his Yale Younger Poets collection from 1952) at the beginning. There is in every Merwin poem the authority that comes from a fine ear, but his early prosody does sound terribly old-fashioned…. Perhaps it is Merwin's hushed tone that gives the youthful work a stilted quality. To readers in 1989, these first poems will serve as reminders of what was fashionable and won prizes in 1952, just three years before Allen Ginsberg, the son of [Walt] Whitman, burst upon the poetry scene when Howl was published by Ferlinghetti.

Though Merwin was living abroad, largely apart from the American voice and scene, he was searching, too, for his own version of Whitman's gift. He found it, oddly enough, not through American poetry but by translating surrealist poets and studying their aesthetics. If the goal was to be in touch with the unconscious, then language could not remain in artificial structures; rather, the poet must search out intuitive ones. Merwin over the years has become convincingly in touch with that deeper self that Whitman claims we all share.

Reading Merwin's poetry, with its lyrical soft-voiced beauty, is like reading inside a dream. His messages seem to mystically link the living and the dead, the silent and the vocal, the reader and the writer. It is not just that many of the poems seem to be a way of talking to the dead or the inaccessible people we can never actually reach. It is also that, like Whitman, he sees himself as a part of the bigger cosmos and never doubts that identity. Consider the entirety of "A Contemporary," which illustrates the floating, transcendental Merwin after he found his American voice:

       What if I came down now out of these
       solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
       day after day with no rain in them
       and lived as one blade of grass
       in a garden in the south when the clouds part in winter
 
       from the beginning I would be older than all the animals
       and to the last I would be simpler
       frost would design me and dew would disappear on me
       sun would shine through me
       I would be green with white roots
       feel worms touch my feet as a bounty
       have no name and no fear
       turn naturally to the light
       know how to spend the day and night
       climbing out of myself
       all my life

This poem is from his 1977 collection, The Compass Flower. I would argue that once Merwin found out what he didn't want to write, he wholeheartedly began to explore his inner self until he found a way for inner and outer to become one. This cosmic awareness is at the heart of the nineteenth-century transcendentalism that led Walt Whitman, after trying other vocations, to poetry:

       "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
       If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles"

This voice whispers in Merwin's poetry, promises that spirit and matter are connected in some way throughout our lives. Perhaps through beauty. Or the life of the imagination. Through poetry itself.

One of the most impressive aspects of Merwin's poems is his gift for a kind of animism. That is, he seems to sense or understand the spirit of everything living in a given landscape. The following passages all show Merwin's strangely democratic vision of the world, with an equal voice or presence to be perceived in every organism or perceived entity:

       before I could talk
       I heard the cricket
       under the house
       then I remembered summer
                              ("The Black Jewel")

and

       In the last chamber of the heart
       all the words are hanging
       but one
       the blood is naked as it steps through the door
                                         ("The Heart")

or

       I sat in the front to see better
       they sat in the back
       having a good time
       and they laughed with their collars up
 
       they said we could take turns driving
       but when I looked
       none of us was driving.
                                ("The Drive Home")

For Merwin, Whitman's transcendentalism is opened up into the twentieth century through surrealist techniques and some of the presumptions of magical realism. His poems reflect an immensely successful American use of these stylistic gestures and postures, reminding us again of what a great and flexible source Whitman is.