Lament for the Makers

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.Praise for Lament for the Makers

“A . . . rich anthology of poems by 20th–century practitioners who influenced Merwin.” —Publishers Weekly

“ . . . an elegant gift for the coffee table of a modern poetry aficionado. —Library Journal

“A superb collection.” —BooklistW. S. Merwin is one of our most distinguished poets and translators and is the acting United States Poet Laureate. A two–time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he has also been honored with the Bollingen Prize and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. In 1995 he received the first Dorothea Tanning Prize. He lives and works in Hawaii.