SOURCE: “In Charge of Morale in a Morbid Time,” in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 171-89.

In the following essay, Taylor surveys the defining qualities of Meredith's poetry.

The Wreck of the Thresher, published in 1964, was the book that most firmly established the nature and strength of William Meredith's poetry. It seems now to have been the culmination of a development in certain directions from which the poet has since swerved, though not unrewardingly. The poems in it reveal unobtrusive mastery of craft traditionally conceived; there are not many sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, or other insistent evidences that the poet is comfortable in formal cages; but beneath the steady, honest lines, with their sometimes unpredictable rhyme schemes, there is a sense of assurance that for Meredith, form is a method, not a barrier. In its range of subject, tone, and mode, the...