William Meredith

On January 9, 1919, William Meredith was born in New York City (Ellmann, O'Clair, and Ramazani 158). He attended Princeton University, and he graduated Magna Cum Laude with an A.B. in English in 1940 ("William Meredith"). Meredith worked at The New York Times for a short amount of time before joining the U.S. army, where he remained for the next five years. While he was enlisted, his first book of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, was published. After he returned to the United States, Meredith taught English at Princeton for a few years. He then briefly reentered the army to participate in the Korean War, and in 1955, he began to teach at Connecticut College (Gezari). From 1978 to 1980, he was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate (Ellmann, O'Clair, and Ramazani 159). Meredith retired from his teaching job at Connecticut College in 1983 after suffering an immobilizing stroke, which strongly affected his speaking and writing skills for the rest of his life. Even so, he was able to publish Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, as well as other works (Ellmann, O'Clair, and Ramazani 159). Meredith spent several years of his life living in both Bulgaria and the United States before he died on May 30, 2007 ("William Meredith"). He is known today as one of the most optimistic and least suicidal of all modern poets.

William Meredith published his poem "Last Things" in 1970 and dedicated it to Robert Lowell. Part IV of this poem is written in free verse, and is thick with allusions to the story of the Greek god Prometheus. After Prometheus gave fire to mankind, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and sending a vulture to gnaw on his liver every day for eternity. Meredith turns this story on its head by calling the vulture "compassion" (line 44) and stating that time has sent it to "gnaw on the stone vitals of each of us" (line 45) in order to prepare us for our own deaths. In other words, the painful things that happen to us are actually a blessing, because they prepare us for the difficult things that lie ahead in our lives.

Bibliography

Poem:

Meredith, William. "Last Things IV." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Volume 2. Eds. Ellmann, Richard, Robert O'Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. 160. Print.

Biography:

Ellmann, Richard, Robert O'Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. The Norton Antholody of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Volume 2. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. Print.

Gezari, Janet. "Memorial Minute: William Meredith." The William Meredith Foundation. The William Meredith Foundation, Inc., 2010. Web. Feb 22 2011. http://williammeredithfoundation.org/william-meredith-bio.htm.

"William Meredith." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. Feb 22 2011. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/121.