Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin's Poetry

W. S. Merwin surely was one of the greatest American poets of his generation. In a career of nearly seven decades, he created a poetic oeuvre that was unique in its imaginative reach, its moral clarity, and its deep engagement with the history of world literature. How fitting that now a distinguished young Chinese poet-scholar of English and European poetry, Feng Dong, has written the most penetrating and original study of Merwin’s work thus far. Drawing on a double frame of Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Heideggerean philosophy, Feng Dong closely attends as well to individual poems and the trajectory of Merwin’s life and works. He shares with his protagonist an understanding of poetry’s liminal powers, writing “Poetry carries with it a phantasmal inner force that constantly breaches its own form.” In the end, as he considers the ever-evolving dynamic between notions of finitude and oblivion in Merwin’s poems, Feng Dong reveals not only the consequences of Merwin’s genius, but also the sources of his melancholy. ~Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University

It is no surprise to discover a Lacanian poet in W. S. Merwin, for whoever has glanced at his towering mass of poems will have noted the relevance of terms like the Thing, the Real outside language, or an Other jouissance, but what is truly surprising is to see how subtly and lightly, how deftly and deeply these concepts can limn an entire body of work. Feng Dong’s brilliant synthesis conjures up the figure of an American Hölderlin who avoided visionary madness by realizing an erotic ecology, by making one with his sexual paradise. ~Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature, University of Pennsylvania

As he traces the dynamic of propulsion toward the infinite—followed by necessary withdrawal—Feng reveals the nuances of Merwin’s profound grief and yet relentless mysticism. Like Merwin’s decade-spanning poetry, Feng’s work is a gift: it’s focused, and yet expansive; it’s a much-needed inflection point in Merwin scholarship; and though it is not a primary aim, Feng provides one of the most illuminatory ways of seeing Merwin’s ecopoetics to date. ~Aaron M. Moe, author of "Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus"