What separates William Meredith from other poets of his generation, such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Howard Nemerov, and James Merrill, is his belief that “poetry and experience should have an exact ratio.” For him this ratio speaks to the seriousness of the lyric. In a Spring 1985 Paris Review interview he says, “I wait until the poems seem addressed not to ‘Occupant’ but to ‘William Meredith.’ And it doesn't happen a lot.” John Crowe Ransom and Philip Larkin are the poets Meredith invokes in praise of his parsimonious muse. Nevertheless, Effort at Speech is strong evidence that in a lifetime of writing Meredith had the luck of generous visits from his muse. His first book, Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), was chosen by Archibald MacLeish for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. In his foreword MacLeish points to an aspect of Meredith's poems that rings true throughout his oeuvre and stands as much for the man as for the work: “[The poems] give the sense of having seen, of having been present, which a man's face sometimes gives, returning. They have the quality of reticence and yet of communication, almost unwilling communication.” What the poems have seen is the Second World War, which was the young Meredith's first purview as a writer. Later his poems preside over equally difficult events of human experience, such as the suicides and early deaths of his friends. More than forty years after Love Letter was published, Meredith's Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize for 1988. In between those two books, Meredith published six other volumes of poems, a highly acclaimed translation of Apollinaire's Alcools, a collection of essays, and an edition of Shelley's poetry. He has served as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for more than thirty years. From 1978 to 1980 he served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Meredith taught at Connecticut College for nearly thirty years.

In 1973 when I first met William Meredith at Connecticut College, where I had enrolled as an undergraduate, he was putting the finishing touches on a short, book-length poem, Hazard, the Painter (1975), and was worried the poem's “free verse was going to be the end of [him].” Hazard, the Painter is a sequence about a modest visual artist who finds his belief in manners and decorum is at odds with the fashionable and dangerous pessimism infecting the times. The urbane, witty, but earnest Hazard—a Meredith alter ego—is meant to continue the long-running argument Meredith had enjoined with his generation, the poets of suicide and confessionalism. By the late 1970s this had devolved into an argument with himself, since many of the principals were no longer around. “Friends making off ahead of time / on their own, I call that willful, John, / but that's not judgment, only argument / such as we've had before” is how he phrases it in “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs,” from The Cheer (1980). Although Meredith was fearful of Hazard's free verse, all of the poems are written with the unerring control that earned him a reputation for being one of his generation's most elegant metricists.

William Meredith was most influenced by Robert Frost and W. H. Auden (see “In Memory of Robert Frost” and “Talking Back (To W. H. Auden)”). In 1940, while at Princeton, Meredith wrote his senior essay on Frost and traveled to New England to meet the revered poet. Auden he met in New York City in the 1950s through a shared love of opera. When Meredith became a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English in the late 1950s, he enjoyed a deep friendship with Frost. In 1961 the older poet invited the younger to accompany him on a reading tour to the West Coast. Similarly, his friendship with Auden was such that when Auden died in 1973 Meredith was named an executor of his estate. Meredith discovered in Frost the metaphoric power inherent in the natural world, especially with regard to plants and trees. But from both Auden and Frost Meredith learned about wit and playfulness, and the sly ways in which poetic conventions could be renewed through colloquial language. Although Meredith enjoyed special relationships with Frost and Auden—two of the “high ones,” as he likes to characterize them—the truth is that many poets of his generation were influenced by them. A more unique influence on Meredith was Muriel Rukeyser. “She was the first poet that I knew personally,” he told the Paris Review. “I knew her when I was still an undergraduate. She was a very amazing human being and any traces of honesty in my life come from having seen how beautifully honest she was in administering her life and her poetry without any separation—you couldn't get a knife between the two things with her. The real influence was her human model of what a poet could be.”

The human model of what a poet could be is what I always encounter in the work and person of William Meredith. “Character” is what Robert Lowell called it. Hazard tells us that he's “gnawed by a vision of rightness / that no one else seems to see,” and he's “in charge of morale / in a morbid time.” I don't think there is an American poet alive who understands, the way Meredith understands, the responsibility a poet has to “administer spiritual vision” to society. Contemporary poets in general do not see themselves as having this responsibility, and if they do it's often a loyalty to anarchy. Or their spiritualism carries the scent of snake oil and pretension. Pretension—spiritual, literary, or intellectual—is something Meredith does not abide, for it is a misrepresentation and distortion of one's self, an inaccurate response. Accuracy of response, which Meredith judges by how well we pay attention to our experience, is the litmus test for authenticity of self.

In a recent exhibition of William Meredith's papers at the Connecticut College library, the letters from his friends Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Maxine Kumin, Robert Penn Warren, and James Merrill attest to their authors' genuine regard for Meredith's work. “I have loved your poems for 40 years,” Merrill wrote in 1988. What is also clear from the letters is the correspondents' trust in the fairness of his critical intelligence, which they regularly sought by sending new work to him for his opinion. The letters show that while Meredith's generation was decimated by spiritual malaise—“dread recidivism” is what he calls Berryman's affliction—they relied on his “vision of rightness” as ballast to their own difficult fathomings.

Meredith did not argue his peers away from their unremitting darkness. Instead he provided an antidote to the age's recidivistic temperament. “What can a man do / but bear witness?” Hazard asks. “And what has he got to tell? / Only the shaped things he's seen—a few things made by men, / a galaxy made well.” Meredith's optimism is not facile, however. It carries with it the knowledge that “we are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black” (“In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs”). Meredith's belief in his own vision of things is embedded in his faith that when words are used accurately to describe experience they cannot lie or bear false witness. In “The Cheer” he writes, “Words addressing evil won't turn evil back / but they can give heart. / The cheer is hidden in right words.” Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are “trying to tell us, / … It's native to the words, / and what they want us always to know, / even when it seems quite impossible to do.”

In 1983, at the age of sixty-four, William Meredith suffered a stroke that left him with expressive aphasia, which means that for the past fourteen years he has not been able to use language to say or write exactly what he wants to say. “I know it!” he will utter with force, “but I can't say the words!” Trapped, as it were, inside his body, which has profoundly betrayed him, for the past decade and a half Meredith has remained occupied with the poet's struggle—the struggle to speak. Effort at Speech is more than an apt title for this collection of his poems. (Coincidentally, the title poem, written in the 1960s, is dedicated to Muriel Rukeyser.) It serves not only as an emblem of his present daily effort to find the “right words,” but it describes what he committed himself to very early on. In the envoi to his second book, Ships and Other Figures (1948), he wrote, as a lieutenant in the Navy, “Go, little book. If anybody asks / Why I add poems to a time like this, / Tell how the comeliness I can't take in / Of ships and other figures of content / Compels me still until I give them names.” The names of things are what William Meredith has been giving us in his poems for more than fifty years. It is equally true, as he said of Rukeyser, that there is no separation between Meredith's life and his poetry. You can't get a knife between the two things. “Not so! Not true at all!” Meredith will protest. But it is true. We have these poems as proof.

Additional coverage of Meredith's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12; Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Vol. 14; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 6, 40; Contemporary Literature Criticism, Vols. 4, 13, 22, 55; DISCovering Authors Modules—Poetry; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5.