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Article: Migration: New and Selected Poems.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Harvard Review
- Article date:
- December 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Harvard Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press, 2005, $40 cloth, ISBN 1556592183.
Although W.S. Merwin has been a fixture on the literary scene since the early 1950s he has never allowed us to take him for granted. With grave formal eloquence his early poems mused through intricate syntax and impeccable rhymes but risked the bombast of the stately. Both thematically and stylistically, "Learning a Dead Language," from Green With Beasts (1956), defines the problem facing the poet coming of age in the era of late Eliot and early Lowell and Wilbur:
There is nothing for you to say. You must
Learn first to listen. Because it is ...