Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology

By W.S. Merwin

Book Overview

With Lament for the Makers W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet.

Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included.

Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582437327
• ISBN13: 9781582437323
• Release Date: November 2010
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A Fine Sampling of Some of Our Best Poets

W.S. Merwin curated single poems from the works of poets who had lived and died during his lifetime and published them under the title LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS: A Memorial Anthology. Himself a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1971, Merwin begins this tasty anthology with an extended poem in which he memorializes (or rather crystallizes) each of the twenty-three poets he has selected. Though not his best poem, it is an apt introduction to works by TS Eliot, WH Auden, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, etc. Reading poems selected by a poet is a lesson in itself. This small anthology will encourage readers, new to some of the poets here, to pursue more complete anthologies (the isolated works are not among the poets' best). A nice bedside book for ending the day in beauty.