Moon Before Morning

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) was born in New York City and became one of the most honored American poets of the post-war era, celebrated for the moral clarity of his environmental consciousness and formal evolution across eight decades of work. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2011. His collection The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum, 1970) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He received a second Pulitzer for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon, 2009). A committed environmental advocate, he spent his later life on a reclaimed pineapple plantation in Hawaii that he restored to native forest. He received the Bollingen Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.