“When the war is over […] we will all enlist again” (The Lice): W.S. Merwin P(r)o(ph)etic
This essay takes Kenneth White’s description of “a quiet apocalypse” as a starting point to read the complexities of W.S. Merwin’s poems in The Lice (1967). The poems are to be related to the context of the Vietnam war: the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam are legible in the tense and dark...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2024-12-01
|
| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23827 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | This essay takes Kenneth White’s description of “a quiet apocalypse” as a starting point to read the complexities of W.S. Merwin’s poems in The Lice (1967). The poems are to be related to the context of the Vietnam war: the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam are legible in the tense and dark poems that protest against them, but they are never explicitly mentioned. Rather, what unfolds is a generic discourse on humankind’s irrepressible propensities to predation, violence and self-destruction. The poems delineate empty indeterminate agents that are intent on performing the dreadful acts that will lead them to a deadly future of extinction. In the wake of T.S. Eliot’s and William Carlos Williams’ opposed yet paradoxically converging visions of spring, W.S. Merwin revises the figure of the poet into the ominous prophet of a programmed apocalypse, delivering in his poems the cryptic messages of a suicidal community of the human. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |