Meredith, William

William Meredith, in full William Morris Meredith, Jr., (born Jan. 9, 1919, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died May 30, 2007, New London, Conn.), American poet whose formal and unadorned verse was compared to that of Robert Frost. Meredith was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Meredith attended Princeton University (A.B., 1940), where he first began to write poetry. After a short stint as a reporter for the New York Times, he joined the army and during World War II was a pilot with the U.S. Navy; he also served (1952–54) in the Korean War. In the mid-1940s Meredith embarked on a teaching career, holding posts at Princeton and the University of Hawaii. In 1955 he joined the faculty of Connecticut College, where he taught 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 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. Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (1997) received a National Book Award. His prose works include 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.