William Meredith
(January 9, 1919 - May 30, 2007)
6300 Bradley Blvd., Bethesda, MD.
Meredith
is the author of ten books of poems, including Love Letter from an
Impossible Land (1944, winner of a Yale Younger Poets Award), The
Open Sea (1957), Earth Walk (1970), Partial Accounts
(1987, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), and Effort at Speech
(1997, winner of the National Book Award). He also published two collections
of essays, an opera libretto, translations of Guillaume Apollinaire
and poets of Bulgaria, and edited the selected poems of Percy Bysshe
Shelley.
Meredith served as US Poet Laureate from 1978 to 1980, then stayed on in the DC area for several years afterwards with his partner, Richard Harteis, also a poet. He was a US Navy pilot in the Korean War (1941-42), where he received two air medals and achieved the rank of lieutenant. From 1964 to 1987, he served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Between 1955 and 1983, he taught at Princeton University, the University of Hawaii, and Connecticut College.
Meredith had a stroke in 1983, resulting in expressive aphasia, which affected his ability to speak. He regained language skills only after intensive therapy.
Photo of author courtesy of Library of Congress.
