W. S. Merwin

Illustrations by Miki LoweThe poet W. S. Merwin was—like many of us, perhaps—preoccupied with his own mortality. He wrote about it often, most famously in “For the Anniversary of My Death”: “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out.” But plenty of his works that seem to deal with the end of life are really about aliveness.

Photo illustrations by Miki LoweW. S. Merwin was a man of many callings. He was an incredibly prolific poet—he won the Pulitzer Prize twice, along with nearly every other major literary award. He also dedicated his life to environmentalism: After moving to a barren pineapple plantation in Hawaii in 1977, he painstakingly restored it to its natural state, growing back hundreds of species of palm.