This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin¿s early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin¿s work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Merwin and Other Poets.- Chapter 2: "High Company": W.S. Merwin, John Berryman and the Art of Poetry.- Chapter 3: The Value and Forms of Contact in the Work of William Carlos Williams and W.S. Merwin.- Chapter 4: The Lost Steps: W. S. Merwin and the Journey Backward.- Part II: Nature, Zen and Ecopoetics.- Chapter 5: Bound to Reverence: Not Knowing, Emptiness, Time, and Nature in W.S. Merwin's Poetry.- Chapter 6: Merwin's Ecopoetic Conservancy.- Chapter 7: Reverence for Nature: Trees in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and Others.- Chapter 8: The Fox Sleeps in Plain Sight: Zen in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin.- Part III: The Poet's Craft.- Chapter 9: "A Sense of Being Linked with People": Poetry, Listening, Intonation.- Chapter 10: Lyric "Unpunctuation": W. S. Merwin's Early New Yorker Correspondence.- Chapter 11: W.S. Merwin's Homecoming in the Heart of Europe.- Chapter 12: Resilience of the Oracular in W.S. Merwin's "Forgotten Language".- Part IV: The Sense of an Ending.- Chapter 13: W.S. Merwin's "Retirement": Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After.- Chapter 14: Merwin's Epic of Dispossession.- Chapter 15: Memory, Belatedness, and Paradise in W.S. Merwin's Later Poetry.- Chapter 16: "The Last Days of the World": Apocalyptic Visions in the Poetry of W.S. Merwin and William Butler Yeats.