Beyond his characteristically smooth iambic rhythms and measured stanzas, usually in rhyme, the range of Mr. Meredith's verse forms [in The Open Sea] includes some imitations of the Haiku and modern adaptations of ballads and sonnets; his cultivated conversation lapses easily and frequently into good everyday speech. His talent tends toward controlled, disciplined poetry which is neither austere nor excessively mannered. Traces of Blake, Yeats, of Auden and Robert Frost show that Mr. Meredith keeps good company, but his output is so thin and spare that one intuitively places him among all the other reasonably competent anonymities….

As one reads these poems, it is the figure of content that touches and re-touches the sensibilities: there are no extremes and very few intense feelings of any kind; no places are brutalized by machines or tyrants; no one is wretched or fascinating or contemptible. The world, unlike the dreadful ones...