The Christian Science Monitor

Poet W.S. Merwin followed where the words led

Since Friday, when poet and translator W.S. Merwin died at his home in Maui, Hawaii, I’ve been thinking about the phone interview he gave me in 2003.  

“Poetry can’t be done as an act of will. You can’t say, ‘I will now write a poem,’” he noted early in our conversation. Yet every morning he sat down to write

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