WILLIAM MORRIS MEREDITH, JR.

'William Morris Meredith, Jr.' (January 9, 1919 - May 30, 2007) was an American poet. He graduated from with Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University in 1940 . He has held professorships at Princeton University, University of Hawaii, and Connecticut College.

Contents

Biography

Bibliography

Poetry

Essays

Awards

References

External links

Biography

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".^[1]
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.^[2] William Meredith, 88, Poet Who Wed Depth to Form, Dies

Bibliography

Poetry

★ ''Love Letter from an Impossible Land'' (1944)

★ ''Ships and Other Figures'' (1948)

★ ''The Open Sea and Other Poems'' (1957)

★ ''The Wreck of the Thresher and Other Poems'' (1964)

★ ''Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems'' (1987)

★ ''Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems'' (1997)

Essays

★ ''Reasons for Poetry, and The Reason for Criticism'' (1982)^[3]

★ ''Poems Are Hard to Read'' (1991)

Awards

★ Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1988 for ''Partial Accounts''

★ National Book Award for Poetry 1997 for ''Effort at Speech''

★ Guggenheim Fellowship 1975

References

1. Pulitzer Prize-winning Connecticut poet dies
2. William M. Meredith, Noted Poet, Dies At 88
3. Reasons for poetry William Meredith

External links

★ William Meredith biography at the Academy of American Poets

★

★ William Meredith page, Connecticut College Library, Department of Special Collections
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