[Brunner is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses the major themes and principles that inform Merwin's poetry.]

Entering his fifth decade of writing, W. S. Merwin continues to stand apart from his contemporaries as the representative of an unusual degree of freedom and independence. That independence is evident in his personal life. He has made his way on his own terms, much as he had hoped when, in 1949, with no prospects before him, he left America for Europe. He is one of the few American poets who have managed to support themselves through writing. But his independence is as evident in his work. Rereading the reviews prompted by Merwin's work, Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom [the editors of W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry, 1987] were struck by the amount of controversy it had generated: "Perhaps no other contemporary poet has been as universally recognized as a major talent and simultaneously so criticized, prodded, reprimanded and challenged at every stage of his career." Yet this is not surprising; indeed, it is almost inevitable.

For one thing, Merwin unsettles critics because each new collection is distinctly different from the last. The extent of his changes has, if anything, been underestimated by reviewers: they have perennially lagged at least one book behind him, expecting his latest volume to continue the tendencies of the one before. But his collections are organized with a break in their middle, a characteristic ever since the original typescript of A Mask for Janus, when a last-minute change included three new poems, among them the most untypical "Dictum: For a Masque of Deluge." As arrangements, then, his collections are designed to elude easy categorization; they begin at a point from which they have, by their end, strenuously departed.

The writing of poetry, for Merwin as for many of the American poets who began their careers in the postwar period, promotes active change. It is a commonplace that American poetry, especially after 1960, is exploratory, its form reflecting the writer's process of making a new discovery. But for Merwin, that discovery is frequently made against a specific background that represents the weight of custom, or the habits of the mind, or the pressures of authority. His discoveries, that is, are not entirely novel; what is discovered had been there all along, waiting to be found, perhaps even neglected by Merwin before. As a result, his poems can seem understated in comparison to those of his contemporaries. None of his poems in praise of creatures can compete for dynamism with Galway Kinnell's "The Porcupine"; none of his family poems are as immersed in regret, in seemingly depthless sorrow, as those by James Wright in memory of his ancestors and boyhood friends. None are as insouciantly dilettantish as work by James Merrill or, at another extreme, John Ashbery; nor are they as somber and rigorous as work by Philip Levine. These poets all work as master stylists, reconceiving language from deep within their own sensibilities.

By contrast, Merwin appears to have no style at all, or to take on whatever style suits the moment. In fact, this transparency is a clue to his effectiveness. His return to a scene discloses what had not been, he had thought, present before. The disclosure is often made through a detail that leads to a subtle shift in perspective that occurs as a surprise but that recasts the whole situation—expanding it, deepening it, widening it. The poetry, then, will always be vulnerable to the criticism that it is too delicate, for it depends on attention paid to small details or brief events. But however delicate those observations may be—and Merwin clearly appreciates their delicacy—their ultimate value is the shift they engender, and that dramatically alters the scope of the whole poem, opening to us realms that had not been otherwise available. The poems may be understated in their individual moments, but as whole works they are remarkably large, even sweeping, in their comprehension. From the minor to the major, from the customary to the rate, these poems repeatedly reenact a process of renewal that is the constant in Merwin's career. Creatures occupy, in their innocence, a fullness that constantly escapes our vain efforts at categorization. A frozen moth, out of place, in the wrong season, may return to life. Barriers becomes thresholds in his late free verse; outcasts and eccentrics become individuals in his family memoirs.

These renewals are not simply affirmations of the poet's vitality or ingenuity or passion, as similar rejuvenations are in the work of contemporaries. Indirectly, gently, but persistently, Merwin undermines the weight of authority. In this respect, his poetry has always had a social, political, and cultural dimension, although its emphasis has varied over the years. He is the gentlest of writers, but his gentleness has been prone to misunderstanding. In his early years, his light touch was mistaken for aloofness, or even a coldness, an inability to express emotions outwardly. Later, in his free verse, his deliberate simplicity was taken as a mark of withdrawal, even a denial that language could serve as communication. It is true that he is fond of the delicate turn of phrase, the graceful observation, the momentary glimpse and impression caught on the wing. But none of these is left to stand by itself. Each appears against its decisive opposite. To list those opposites would be a formidable task: they are everything we feel as the weight of the institution, everything that derives authority by generating an order that excludes accident, everything that unswervingly proceeds to a stipulated end. But the continual surprise in Merwin's work is that gestures contrary to these institutions, gestures that might be fragile, too fleeting to endure, too graceful to command, are rendered as though they were equal to powers vast, pervasive, dominating.

It is not Merwin's intent to arrange contests in which megaliths are toppled. But the distinction he tirelessly pursues is that between an orderly world, which is the invention of humans who hope to ensure stability through repetition, and that world's opposite, which cannot have a single name, which unfolds equidistantly through time and space and seems riddled with exceptions. The orderly world abounds in grammar and lexicons; everything there has been named and exists because there is a word for it. The other world is one of gesture and activity; it may be called silent but only because it will always escape from any name we give it. This other world is unimaginably innocent. Every moment in it is an origin. If any definition of poetry could be extracted from Merwin's work it would be the following: Poetry is the problematic area that breaks into existence when the poet once again realizes these two worlds as they intersect, overlie, and disrupt each other. One of the few predictable results is that our sense of scale will be subverted: what we had thought to be large diminishes, and what we had held to be tiny assumes cosmic proportions. And matters of scale become matters of value: what had seemed commanding reveals itself as bombast, and what had seemed the merest detail becomes a pivotal point for a vast new perspective. The three-line poem may equal the thousand-line poem.

Our assumptions about these two worlds, under Merwin's guidance, come to be reversed. We ordinarily think of the human world as that which is enduring, erecting stable orders resistant to change; indeed, our impulse to shape the world derives from our desire for such enduring stability. The silent world of immanent origins is viewed, if at all, as a matter of fleeting impressions, flashing glimpses, for that is the only way we can perceive its unimaginable wholeness. But for Merwin, the world that is silent and free will endure and persist while what we shape over and against it is subject to loss and decay. We may perceive that other world as utterly relative because of its ability to shift out from under our perceptions. But it is our own perceptions that are shifting and relative to it.

The gentleness that pervades Merwin's writing is not simply a character trait. Its higher purpose is to remind us that we are limited in the control we can impose, that the order and authority we take for granted are ultimately uncertain, liable to dissolve with a mere change in perspective. Poetry, for Merwin, can never be planned or conceived, only recognized when it occurs. "The encouragement of poetry itself," he writes in his 1966 essay, "Notes for a Preface," "is a labor and privilege like that of living. It requires, I imagine, among other startlingly simple things, a love of poetry, and possibly a recurring despair of finding it again, an indelible awareness of its parentage with that biblical waif, ill at ease in time, the spirit. No one has any claims on it, no one deserves it, no one knows where it goes." Merwin's position is not anti-intellectual. It is, however, intent upon incorporating the intellect into a network rather than establishing it at the top of a hierarchy.

By virtue of their intelligence, humans are forever estranged from the sheer innocence of creatures, from the seamless wholeness of the natural world. But the intelligence of the human species may become, in poetry, its own naturalizing context. The mind becomes complete, even in its incompleteness, if it can yield to its natural bent, which is that curious speculation that draws us toward what we do not know. Nature is always both different from us and hauntingly familiar to us, its innocence a trait we come closest to sharing when we are at our most curious and speculative. For Merwin, the poet is involved not in projecting himself onto his subjects but in making room for subjects to project themselves. The poet who can do that becomes the caretaker of thresholds over which subjects can pass without coercion, on their own terms.

Merwin's convictions have not changed, only acquired a new urgency in his most recent work, following The Rain in the Trees. His conviction that we must understand the limited time frame in which we, as a species, have operated is one of his most enduring beliefs. To understand that, to integrate it into our every action, is, quite simply, an expression of human thought at its highest, a use of the mind to check the powers of the mind, with the intent not of thwarting the intellect but of integrating it with the surroundings that should nourish it. The mind's power can be misused. The mind can adopt and enforce techniques that end in the blindness of routine procedures that control and even reshape the world, or it can remain in open contact with that which escapes understanding—that which always requires further understanding, with one horizon reached only to divulge another, and another.

"The Wars in New Jersey" considers what happens when we consign an area to oblivion by withholding our attention from it: "This is the way we were all brought up now / we imagine and so we all tell / of the same place by saying nothing about it." The ruins of the Jersey flats are passed each day by thousands of commuters, all of whom studiously ignore the devastation beyond their windows. Merwin employs the first person plural, for these regions of devastation that we agree to overlook are everywhere and all around us. "We roll through them canned in a dream of steel / but the campaigns we know we know / were planned and are still carried out for our sake." Can we deliberately ignore even one element in our lives without ultimately infecting every aspect of our life? We may prefer to believe this area is just a dead zone, but Merwin portrays it as a complex battlefield, a war being fought in our own names. The insistent refrain "we know we know" haunts his descriptions; this is the portrait we have drawn of ourselves. At the end of his poem, he places the finishing touches on our self-portrayal:

               … we emerge into the old
       platform only a few minutes late
       as though it were another day
       in peacetime and we knew why we were there

The mindless destruction of the environment is the great issue of our time, yet it is a battle characterized by our refusal to acknowledge it. Consequently, we step out on a stage that is appropriately deserted, upon which we remain preoccupied with trivial matters, thinking we are "only a few minutes late" instead of realizing we may be the witnesses of the final days. The empty space and diminished time we passively inhabit reveal how severely foreshortened our perspectives have become. Our ignorance is complete, as Merwin icily remarks: we even act as though we know why we are there.

Arranging routines, establishing boundaries—these are, for Merwin, marks of a civilization that has lost its confidence and must nervously exert its authority. The danger of such a civilization lies in its indifference to everything but the dominion it occupies. In contrast, Merwin would remind us of the self-sufficient completeness of the natural world and what it offers as a perennial source of surprise and wonder.

The lesson returns again in "Among Bells." Climbing to the top of a belfry, he surveys the square of a foreign city below him; the objects there are intricate and elaborate expressions of a rich civilization. But the marvel of the poem, its governing force and reason for being, occurs when he discovers a bird huddled "above / one of the blackened cornices" and lifts it down as though it had perished there. The creature, held in his hands "like a bundle with no weight at all," then comes to life, escaping to a balustrade:

       for a moment glancing
       back as a black planet after which
       it was gone with a shriek into the long
       afternoon light that touched the net
       of wires
 
       the waiting aerials
       bare poles lines of laundry chimney flues
       patched roofs pots of geraniums windows
       standing open while in the streets
       the same
       hats legs and wagons were
       moving toward unchanging destinations
       and at the station trains were arriving
       on time without a sound and just
       leaving

The description of the city is changed by the escape of the bird, as though the authority of its parting glance ("as a black planet") passed to Merwin, altering the way he sees. Yet the alteration is subtle. On the one hand, after the lightninglike freedom of the bird, the objects of the city turn lumpish and clunky, separate but heaped together; moving objects seem to shift mechanically like toys. On the other hand, Merwin's descriptive lines also shake off the stiffness of a stark contrast—they even yield an opposite sense, as though the "bare poles lines of laundry chimney flues" were skimmed over rapidly, as seen by the bird, and the trains that arrive and leave soundlessly imitated the speed and flight of the chimney swift. Both perspectives remain present, each unsettling the other, as though Merwin held first one, then the other, as he sought to regain the balanced overview with which he opened his poem. But the point is that after the bird has asserted its autonomy, "Among Bells" is no longer exclusively his poem.

What Merwin would evoke, now more than ever, is the persisting presence of forces in the natural world to which we have grown blind. But these are the forces that endure, he would insist, representing a continuum that stretches beyond our understanding, that we must appreciate even as they judge us. We must submit to their judgment if we are to be complete, not submit them to ours.

In "The Blind Seer of Ambon," Merwin speaks in the voice of Georg Rumpf, the seventeenth-century naturalist (who loaned his name to a species of the cycad plant, as noted in "So Far") because the tragic events that disrupted Rumpf's life at every turn—the death of his wife and daughter in an earthquake, the destruction of his drawings and manuscripts in a fire, the extinction of the very species he had identified, and, finally, the loss of his own eyesight—are an unbearably complete record of the frailty that surrounds an individual life. Everyone and everything to which he was most deeply attached, all in his life that should have flourished and endured, has been taken away. Shakespeare's Lear went mad when stripped of the trappings of civilization and of everything he held dear to him. But Merwin's version of Lear is different, and Rumpf, although he has every reason to be Lear, is himself. Having lost all, what he discovers is how much still remains, the everything left to him that is the everything that had always been there, even in his blindness:

       so this is the way I see now
       I take a shell in my hand
       new to itself and to me
       I feel the thinness the warmth and the cold
       I listen to the water
       which is the story welling up
       I remember the colors and their lives
       everything takes me by surprise
       it is all awake in the darkness

The example may seem extreme; but given the lateness of the hour it is entirely appropriate. Merwin's aim, here as in so much of his work, is inseparable from his desire to transform the meager into the abundant, with the smallest, the gentlest, even the easiest of gestures, so that there can be no hesitation, no reluctance, no fear. He offers us what no one can ever possess, yet what should always be available to everyone.