Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology

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.

Publishers Weekly

"Our plesance here is all vain-glory/ This false warld is bot transitory," wrote William Dunbar in his 16th-century poem, "Lament for the Makaris." The piece was not only a meditation on death but a memorial to a slew of influential writers (Chaucer, and the like) who had passed on. Now, borrowing title, theme and rhyme scheme, Merwin, at age 69, does likewise: "The notes in some anthology/ listed persons born after me." So he turns to embrace a star-studded corpus. Twenty-three of his mentors, from Frost to Plath to Roethke to Merrill, are fondly, if briefly, remembered in this 208-line dirge ("then word of the death of Stevens/ brought a new knowledge of silence"). And, in a stroke of clever marketing, a single poem from each of the departed, complete with photo and mini-obit, rounds out what is essentially a coffee-table book of a dead poets' society, a small but rich anthology of poems by 20th-century practitioners who influenced Merwin. (Nov.)