William Morris Meredith

William Morris Meredith Jr. (January 9, 1919 – May 30, 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, and the recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Biography

Early years Meredith was born in New York City to William Morris Meredith Sr. and Nelley Keyser. He attended Lenox School in Massachusetts, graduating in 1936. He began writing while a college student at Princeton University. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1940, having written a senior thesis on Robert Frost. His first volume of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, appeared in 1944. Archibald MacLeish selected it for publication as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.

Career Meredith worked briefly for the New York Times as a copy boy and reporter before joining the United States Army Air Force in 1941. The next year, he transferred to the United States Navy as a carrier pilot. He served in the Aleutian Islands and Pacific Theater and reached the rank of lieutenant. He continued his service in the United States Navy Reserve until 1952, when he reenlisted to serve in the Korean War. He ultimately attained the rank of lieutenant commander and was awarded two Air Medals. Meredith also received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the International Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry.

One of the most complete collections of Meredith's work, "The William Meredith Papers," is housed at Connecticut College, where he taught. The collection documents his life and work as of one of Connecticut College's most eminent faculty members and one of the nation's most respected poets. The collection contains letters, drafts, speeches, and papers relating to many organizations with which Meredith was associated, such as the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Connecticut College, Princeton University, Yaddo, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, cultural and governmental agencies in Bulgaria, and the Estate of W. H. Auden.

Connecticut College acquired the papers in 1994. They are in the Special Collections department of the Charles E. Shain Library. One may consult the collection by arrangement with the Special Collections Librarian. The library also has a virtually complete collection of Meredith's published work, including many of the anthologies and issues of literary journals in which individual poems were published or reprinted. The book collection also includes presentation copies of Robert Frost's poetry that Frost gave Meredith, several with inscriptions and holograph poems.

A longtime admirer of W. B. Yeats, Meredith fulfilled his ambition to visit Yeats's spiritual homeplace of Sligo, Ireland, in 2006. While there he also attended the Yeats International Summer School, which attracts many academics and admirers of Yeats to Sligo every summer.

Personal life Meredith died in New London, Connecticut, near his home in Montville, where he lived with his partner of 36 years, the poet and fiction writer Richard Harteis. A film about his life, Marathon, premiered on November 19, 2008, in Mystic, Connecticut.