The rap against W. S. Merwin’s poetry has been that it is obscure and abstract, as aloof as a balloon on the end of a string. It’s true that he’s an elegant poet, easy to admire but hard to care deeply about.

After a string of masterly books in the late 1960s and early 70s  books like “The Lice” (1967) and “The Carrier of Ladders” (1970), filled with caustic antiwar poems and visions of the despoiled planet, and adroitly flecked with classical allusion  he took a step back from the modern world. His remote house in Hawaii  he moved to Maui in the mid-70s  and his interest in Zen Buddhism have sometimes made him seem like a man apart from society, a soul too pure too mix with the frantic heave of life as we know it. During the second half of his long career he’s been a ghost outside the machine.

Critics, it seems, wrote him off too early. Mr. Merwin, now 82, has been on a late-career sprint, not dissimilar to the one Philip Roth has been running for the past decade and a half. In 2005 Mr. Merwin won a National Book Award for his career-spanning collection “Migration: New and Selected Poems.” In 2009 he won a Pulitzer Prize, his second, for “The Shadow of Sirius,” a pared-down volume filled with simmering, death-haunted cognition. His poetic nostrils seem to be open and flared wide, in a way they haven’t been for decades. Mr. Merwin is back, and he is having a moment.

The most surprising thing about Mr. Merwin’s selection as poet laureate of the United States is that he hasn’t held the position before. (In 1999-2000 he was a special consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial, along with Rita Dove and Louise Glück, but that wasn’t quite the same thing.) He is an establishment poet who has collected most of the establishment’s prizes. Some will call his selection now safe, dull, uncontroversial, blah. And they’ll have a point. It is not the kind of choice that makes one leap up and blow hard into a vuvuzela.