Discuss “Speaking in a forgotten language”

“If you are not impressed — you are un-impressable,” stated Samuel Hazo, the director of the Pittsburgh International Poetry Forum, when he introduced the 79-year-old man who sat placidly in the solitary armchair against the back wall of the Carnegie Lecture Hall.

This man, W.S. Merwin, is a recipient of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award, the Golden Wreath Award, and the Ambassador Book Award, as well as a selection by the Yale Series of Younger Poets; he also notably served as a Special Bicentennial Poet Laureate Consultant for the Library of Congress from 1999 to 2000. This man, poet, environmentalist, translator,...