I with no voice: Absence, presence, and intersubjectivity in the poetry of W. S. Merwin

This study examines the poetry of W.S. Merwin from the perspective of object relations theory in order to establish continuities among the disparate stages of his career and to correct false dichotomies that an emphasis on absence and presence has introduced into Merwin criticism. The defining feature of Merwin's poetry is the search for recognition between self and other, and the shifts in style and voice that occur throughout his work are motivated by efforts first to compensate for a lack of recognition, and later to construct a mode of being that is based on the condition of mutual recognition. This struggle is rooted in Merwin's childhood experience with a family ruled by a restrictive father, whose injunctions and denial of Merwin's agency consistently frustrated the poet's access to recognition. In this framework, the self defined by extremities of absence and that defined by extremities of presence, the two poles that dominate Merwin's work through the 1980s, are both examples of a narcissistic position that resurrects a belief in the omnipotence of either the other or the self in order to compensate for the vacuum created by the lack of recognition. Merwin's early work features the voices of exiles whose wanderings shield them from the failure of recognition in the domestic space. As his poems begin to explore family and autobiography in more detail, the paternal sources of this failure become clearer. Merwin's radical alteration of his poetic language in the 1960s and 1970s is an attempt to combat the effects of paternal repression. After the death of his parents, Merwin writes poems of love and nature characterized by an extreme presence in an effort to deny the loss of the loved object. Both of these strategies ultimately fail to undo the power of restriction because in their vision of the other as object, they maintain the narcissistic/omnipotent position of the earlier poems. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin uses his relation to landscape in order to move away from a narcissistic/omnipotent dynamic towards an intersubjective dynamic, one he ultimately uses to engage in a re-examination of the family material.