W. S. Merwin

"'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' What's so remarkable about that line?" W. S. Merwin, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, asked an audience of around one hundred people last night in the Gothic Reading Room on Duke's West Campus. "Everything. It's perhaps the most remarkable line in the English language."

Mr. Merwin was the latest in a long line of luminous literary figures who have visited our city as part of the William Blackburn Series of Visiting Poets and Fiction Writers. He recited Shakespeare's line as he explained that poetry is often made up of lines and phrases we hear everyday but do not impress us as remarkable--until they are set in the context of a poem. "'That is no country for old men.' What is remarkable about that line from Yeats?" Nothing, perhaps, but, as Mr. Merwin explained, sometimes a line acquires a momentum of its own, like a train leaving a station, and the poet must be ready to jump on it and let it take him where it may.

One's experience of a poem is acutely personal. After reading "The Animals," one of his early poems, Mr. Merwin suggested that every person who just heard it will react to it in a different way. He told his audience about a letter he once received from a young man. The young man claimed that one of Merwin's poems, "Little Horse," had kept him from going to Vietnam. Just why the poem had that effect--indeed, why any poem has a particular effect at all--must remain a mystery.

Mr. Merwin was introduced by James Applewhite, a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Duke and a considerable poet in his own right. "A maker of souls": that is what Professor Applewhite called Mr. Merwin. Each member of the audience was given an attractive broadside on which was printed "From the Start," a poem in Mr. Merwin's recent collection titled The Shadow of Sirius. The printing was by Officina Briani, an artisan printer in Raleigh, and was designed by Jan Martell, a designer in Durham.