William Morris Meredith, Jr.

William Morris Meredith, Jr. (9 January 1919 - 30 May 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980. Meredith was born in New York City to William Morris Meredith, Sr. and Nelley Keyser. He began writing while a college student at Princeton University where with his first volume of poetry Love Letter from an Impossible Land he was selected by Archibald MacLeish for ... more

William Morris Meredith, Jr. (9 January 1919 - 30 May 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980. Meredith was born in New York City to William Morris Meredith, Sr. and Nelley Keyser. He began writing while a college student at Princeton University where with his first volume of poetry Love Letter from an Impossible Land he was selected by Archibald MacLeish for publication as part of Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1940 , writing a senior thesis on Robert Frost. 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. In 1988 Meredith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems and in 1997 he received the National Book Award for Effort at Speech. Meredith was also... less