W.S. Merwin
Quick answer: W.S. Merwin craft guide: unpunctuated lines, parable and deep ecological attention. Learn what removing all punctuation can do for your own poetry.
W.S. Merwin (1927-2019) had one of the longest and most deliberately reinvented careers in American poetry. Chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1952, he began as an elegant formalist, then, in the 1960s, made a decision poets still discuss: he dropped punctuation entirely. From The Lice (1967) onward, his poems float on white space, their clauses joining and dividing in the reader's ear alone.
He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971 and The Shadow of Sirius in 2009, served as US Poet Laureate, and spent his last decades on Maui restoring nineteen acres of ruined land into a palm forest. The gardening and the poetics were the same practice: patient attention to living systems.
The signature moves
Move one: the unpunctuated sentence. Without commas or full stops, a Merwin line can attach to the line before it or the line after it, and often both readings work. The ambiguity is engineered: syntax becomes a current you ride rather than a fence you follow, and the voice takes on the timeless sound of something remembered rather than said.
Move two: parable and myth. Many poems read like fragments of scripture from no known religion, addressing absence, doors, silence, an unborn future, which lets private grief speak in universal grammar. Move three: ecological witness. His mourning for extinct and vanishing species, most famously in his elegy for the future titled For a Coming Extinction, made him a central poet of environmental conscience decades before it was common. Move four: the breath-shaped line, since with punctuation gone, line breaks alone conduct the pace, and his breaks are placed with a musician's care.
What you can learn
Run the punctuation experiment. Take a finished poem, strip every mark, then repair the confusion using only line breaks and word order. You will discover which of your commas were doing real work and which were habit, and the surviving poem will move with a strange new fluency. Even if you restore punctuation afterwards, the syntax will have improved.
Practise the parable voice: write about a personal loss as if it were an ancient story about anyone, using simple nouns, door, water, name, stone. And apprentice yourself to one patch of living ground, a garden, a verge, a single tree, recording it across seasons. Merwin's authority on the natural world was earned by exactly this kind of attention, and judges reading nature poems can always tell watched detail from stock imagery.
Where to start reading
The Lice (1967) is the pivotal book, stark poems of the Vietnam era including For the Anniversary of My Death, in which the poet considers the unknown date he passes each year. The Carrier of Ladders (1970) won his first Pulitzer. The Shadow of Sirius (2008) shows the luminous late style and won his second. Migration gathers selected poems across the whole arc.
What poets can take from this
- Remove all punctuation from one draft and re-engineer it with breaks alone.
- Write a poem in which each line can attach to its neighbours two ways.
- Retell a private loss as an anonymous parable with elemental nouns.
- Keep a season-long notebook on one small piece of ground.
- Read Merwin aloud slowly to learn how white space paces a voice.
Try it yourself
Write an unpunctuated poem about an anniversary you observe privately, a death, a departure, a diagnosis, letting at least three line breaks create genuine double readings, and end on an image from the natural world observed this week.
Questions
Why did W.S. Merwin stop using punctuation?
He said punctuation belonged to the printed page while he wanted the poems to sound spoken, even overheard, like something remembered whole. From the 1960s on, line breaks and word order alone control the pace and grammar of his poems.
What awards did W.S. Merwin win?
Two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971 and The Shadow of Sirius in 2009, the National Book Award for Migration in 2005, and appointment as US Poet Laureate in 2010, among many other honours across a seven-decade career.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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