W. S. Merwin

One of the most conspicuous absences from much of contemporary literature is the sustained, fine intricacy of personal relationships. There seem to me two particularly important and different realizations of this situation, very roughly divided between poetry and fiction, and it is these I wish to discuss. They are important because both self-consciously deny the primary importance of personality, rather than simply eliding its possibility, and they are as different as the fanciful, spiralling cumuli of Robert Coover's fiction from the austere chill of W. S. Merwin's poetry. Merwin is haunted, as Coover, by a need to break up the solidity of the subject, to introduce within the field of personality a radical dislocation which severs its tenacious, grasping hold on itself. Yet it is Merwin, too, who of all contemporary poets most directly resists the paralyzing fictions of artifice which have moved to occupy the center of contemporary writing such as Coover's, a center left vacant by the absence of subject, of personality. I don't, of course, intend my division between poetry and fiction to be omnipresent, or even that the absence of personal relationships must be always and everywhere a problem in discussing contemporary literature. My sense of the critic's job is that he is obliged to perform as fully as possible a passage which can accompany and sustain the movement into

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