Synopses & Reviews
In 1948, twenty-one, already married and graduated from Princeton, W. S. Merwin made his first trip abroad. "Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation.” Thus begins his most recent volume of memoir,
Summer Doorways.Through his days as a student in seminary school and at Princeton, through the years he next spent as a tutor for the children of privilege living abroad, Summer Doorways tells the story of the poet’s youth before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952. Merwin describes life in a Europe that was already passing away at the close of the Second World War. He writes, “I would have the luck to discover, to glimpse, to touch for a moment some ancient, measureless way of living, of being in the world, some fabric long taken for granted, never finished yet complete, at once fixed and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.”
Synopsis
America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation,” writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janusthe moment was, as the author writes, an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer.”