Meredith, William Morris, Jr.

▪ 2008

      American poet

born Jan. 9, 1919, New York, N.Y.

died May 30, 2007, New London, Conn.

was awarded (1988) a Pulitzer Prize for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987), a collection that showcased his formal and unadorned verse, which was compared to that of Robert Frost. Meredith attended Princeton University (A.B., 1940), where he first began to write poetry and later taught. In 1955 he joined the faculty of Connecticut College, where he remained until 1983, when he suffered a severe stroke that affected not only his ability to speak but also his ability to use language. From 1978 to 1980 he was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now the poet laureate consultant in poetry). Meredith's first collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), drew on his experiences in the Pacific during World War II and won praise for its eloquence and honesty. Ships and Other Figures (1948) was based on his experiences in the navy, and several of Meredith's later works, such as The Open Sea, and Other Poems (1958) and The Wreck of the Thresher, and Other Poems (1964), also deal with nautical themes and use the sea as a metaphor. Meredith eventually regained his language skills, and Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (1997) received a National Book Award. His prose works included two lectures he delivered as poetry consultant, published as Reasons for Poetry & The Reason for Criticism (1982), and Poems Are Hard to Read (1991). He translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire in Alcools: Poems, 1878–1913 (1964), and he contributed, with Richard Harteis, to The White Island (1998–2000), a bilingual collection of English and Bulgarian poetry.

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