W.S. Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He attended Princeton University, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. Merwin spent a postgraduate year at Princeton studying Romance languages, an interest that would lead eventually to his much-admired work as translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry. After leaving Princeton, Merwin traveled to France, Spain, and England. He settled in Majorca in 1950 as a tutor to Robert Graves's son. Graves, with his interest in mythology, would become a primary influence on young Merwin.

Merwin's first book of poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for 1952, selected by W.H. Auden, who remarked in his introduction on the young poet's technical virtuosity. That volume, A Mask for Janus, is formal, neoclassical in style. For the next decade Merwin would regularly publish collections of intensely wrought, brightly imagistic poems.