Librarian of Congress Appoints W.S. Merwin Poet Laureate

Posted on July 12, 2010

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed W.S. Merwin as the Library's 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2010-2011. Merwin will take up his duties in the fall, opening the Library's annual literary series on Oct. 25 with a reading of his work. William Stanley Merwin succeeds Kay Ryan as Poet Laureate.

"William Merwin's poems are often profound and, at the same time, accessible to a vast audience," Billington said. "He leads us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life to half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself. In his poem 'Heartland,' Merwin seems to suggest that a land of the heart within us might help map the heartland beyond-and that this 'map' might be rediscovered in something like a library, where 'it survived beyond/ what could be known at the time/ in its archaic/ untaught language/ that brings the bees to the rosemary.'"

During a 60-year writing career, Merwin has received nearly every major literary award. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, just recently in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius. He also won the Pulizter in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders. In 2006, he won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress for Present Company. His retrospective collection, Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. Merwin is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose.