William Meredith was born in New York City in 1919. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1940 , writing a senior thesis on Robert Frost. He taught at Connecticut College between 1955 and 1983 before a stroke forced him to retire.
He worked briefly for the New York Times before joining the United States Navy as a flier. Meredith re-enlisted in the Korean War receiving two Air Medals.
Meredith started writing while still a college student. His first volume of poetry Love Letter from an Impossible Land was selected by Archibald MacLeish for publication as part of Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Meredith wrote deliberately publishing 12 volumes of poetry in all. Between 1978 and 1980, he served as the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress commonly known as the poet laureate.
In 1988 , he won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems" and the National Book Award in 1997 for "Effort at Speech".
A long time admirer of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Meredith fulfilled a long-time ambition, in the summer of 2006, by visiting Yeats's spiritual homeplace of Sligo, Ireland, where he also attended the renowned Yeats International Summer School, which attracts many renowned academics and admirers of Yeats to Sligo every summer.
Meredith died on 31 May 2007 in New London, Connecticut, near his home in Montville, where he lived with his partner of 36 years, Richard Harteis.
(From Wikipedia)
THE ILLITERATE
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
William Meredith (1919 - 2007)
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