W. S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward he made the greater part of his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, the Bollingen Award, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of dozens of books, the most recent of which is The Pupil.

About Migration:

"One of America's greatest living poets."
—Washington Post Book World

"The intentions of Merwin's poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and underground."
—Peter Davison

"In a time when so many writers are satisfied with simply writing publishable poems, it is gratifying to read poetry that is this ambitious, that cares about vision and the possibilities of poetry, by a poet who is capable of so much change."
—The Nation

"W.S. Merwin is our strongest poet of silence and doubt, vacancy and absence, deprival and dispossession...Mr. Merwin has gone through several sea changes in his work over the past four decades. he began in the 1950's witha Poundian reading list and a graceful style reminiscent of Robert Graves, a gift for elaborate ornamentation and traditional meters. In teh 60's and early 70's he radically stripped down his style, dropping punctuation and creating a compelling quasi-Surrealist imagery and vocabulary of darkness and loss. The poet of urbanity and wit became a cryptic visionary of the void, an anguished prophet of apocalypse. In the latter part of teh 70's and throughout the 80's he has continued as a poet of ghostly negativities while slowly embracing a dream of pastoral or ecological wholeness."
—Edward Hirsch