SOURCE: A foreword to Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems by William Meredith, Triquarterly Books, 1997, pp. xiii-xvi.

In the following essay, Collier determines the major influences on Meredith's work.

What separates William Meredith from other poets of his generation, such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Howard Nemerov, and James Merrill, is his belief that “poetry and experience should have an exact ratio.” For him this ratio speaks to the seriousness of the lyric. In a Spring 1985 Paris Review interview he says, “I wait until the poems seem addressed not to ‘Occupant’ but to ‘William Meredith.’ And it doesn't happen a lot.” John Crowe Ransom and Philip Larkin are the poets Meredith invokes in praise of his parsimonious muse. Nevertheless, Effort at Speech is strong evidence that in a lifetime of writing Meredith had the luck of generous visits from his muse. His first book, Love Letter from...