U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1978-1980
William Meredith was born in New York City in 1919. He was the author of nine poetry collections, including Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987), and Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (1997). He also published books of prose, translations, and co-edited work. Meredith received fellowships from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and was the recipient of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Loines Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from The Poetry Foundation. He served many years in the U.S. Navy, during which he achieved the title of Lieutenant Commander and received two Air Medals. Meredith taught English at Princeton University as Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Writing and Resident Fellow in Creative Writing for four years, was an instructor at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College for four years, and taught English at Connecticut College from 1955-1983. In 1963, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978-1980. William Meredith died in 2007.
Audio Recordings of William Meredith
- William Meredith reading his poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, October 2, 1978
- Reasons for poetry: some roles contemporary poets see themselves fulfilling; a lecture by William Meredith in the Coolidge Auditorium, May 7, 1979
- William Meredith reading his poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, Oct. 2, 1979
- The uses of criticism: a lecture by William Meredith in the Coolidge Auditorium, May 5, 1980
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, William Meredith, Consultant in Poetry, reading his poems and those of other consultants in poetry in the Coolidge Auditorium, Oct. 6, 1980