SOURCE: “The Language of the Tribe: William Meredith's Poetry,” in Southwest Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 1-17.

In the following essay, Herrington categorizes Meredith's verse as meditative poetry.

To know what is possible, and to do that. 

—“Freezing”

From his first book, Love Letters from an Impossible Land—Archibald MacLeish's 1944 choice for the Yale Younger Poets Series—to The Cheer (1980), the poetry of William Meredith has been characterized by a recognizable presence. The voice you hear is that of a poet in doubt neither about the human place in the universe nor about his privilege as a poet to strengthen that position by careful attention. Essentially classical in its celebration of the limits of human knowledge, the consolation of friendship and love, the bafflement of death, the poetry is primarily meditative in method. At his best, Meredith considers an object, a scene, or a situation and moves, in...