A Study Guide for W. S. Merwin's "The Horizons of Rooms"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for W. S. Merwin's "The Horizons of Rooms," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535824897

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The Horizons of Rooms

W. S. Merwin

1988

Introduction

The Horizons of Rooms, from W. S. Merwin’s 1988 collection The Rain In the Trees, published in New York City, is a solid example of the late style of one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets. Merwin’s work began in his postcollege years in the 1950s with a strong, intellectual mastery of the classical poetic forms. By the time of his 1967 collection, The Lice, he had developed a unique voice: terse and angry, the poems in this collection did without punctuation, as if what they had to say was too overwhelmingly personal for the writer to bother with conventions of grammar. The Lice was Merwin’s best-known book, with over a dozen reprintings, leading a generation of poets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to copy his style to express their own social concerns. Merwin’s later poetry shifted its focus toward the destruction of the environment and began showing more and more rumination on history, especially natural history. These subjects are explored in The Horizons of Rooms.

This poem reflects on the way humanity has come to accept the concept of rooms as a defining part of existence, blocking out any sense of nature in the process. It reminds readers that rooms have actually been in existence for just a small fraction of the large scope of world history and gives an example of how making a room in a cave allowed for survival in prehistoric times. The problem, as Merwin presents it, is that people no longer see nature for what it is, only that it is outside of rooms, making even the widest open places just an interlude between one room and another. Many have forgotten the sky, the poem tells readers, and the problem is getting worse every day.

Author Biography

William Stanley Merwin was born on September 30, 1927, in New York City. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey, and then in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In the 1940s, he attended Princeton University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1947 and going on for just one year toward his graduate degree in modern languages. It was at Princeton that Merwin began writing poetry, with the encouragement of the noted literary figures R. P. Blackmur,