SOURCE: “William Meredith: ‘All of a Piece and Clever and at Some Level, True’,” in Alone with America: the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Thames and London, 1965, pp. 318-26.

In the following essay, Howard praises the restraint and tone of Meredith's early verse.

“Art by its very nature asserts at least two kinds of good—order and delight.” So William Meredith, in his introduction to a selection from Shelley, a poet who interests this decorous American for his patience with established verse forms, being “otherwise impatient of everything established.” Meredith's declension of order and delight as versions of the good, a paring susceptible of a whole range of inflections, from identity to opposition, 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,¹ a curious restraint, a self-congratulatory withholding that...