Meredith's declension of order and delight as versions of the good … is the generating trope of his own poetry, its idiopathy or primary affection.

In his four books of poems, even in his translations of Apollinaire, a curious restraint, a self-congratulatory withholding that is partly evasive and sly, partly loving and solicitous, testify, like so many essays in emphasis, to the war between delight and order, and yet to the necessity of divising them in each other: if order is not found in delight, the world falls apart; if delight is not taken in order, the self withers. Success, for Meredith, is provisional—he does not ask more. (p. 372)

Meredith's first book [Love Letter from an Impossible Land] certainly stands under the sign of every kind of authority: military, educational, institutional and, as an expression of them all, the formal authority of closed verse forms: strict songs, sonnets...