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Voice lessons

Four decades' worth of poetry from a "minor" but tenacious talent

by Adam Kirsch

EFFORT AT SPEECH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, by William Meredith. TriQuarterly Books, 230 pages, $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

William Meredith was born in 1919, within a few years of such major American poets as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Elizabeth Bishop. And Meredith's résumé, like theirs, is studded with many of the highest distinctions American poetry has to offer: he has been a Yale Younger Poet and a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and in 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet in "Grace," the last poem in Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems, he assesses his career in terms that Lowell and Bishop would never have used:

When they needed a foreign part,
a valve which was not to be found
or spared elsewhere in his ample,
useful body, they chose a pig's valve.

This will be comparable, they reasoned,
with such pig-headed machinery
as has sustained a minor poet
for sixty-three years in America.

To look back on one's own long career and consider it "minor," despite all conventional trappings of success, is an act of no small courage. Effort at Speech bears out Meredith's self-judgment; inescapably, Meredith will go down in history as one of the minor poets of a major generation. But if he is minor, he is not, as this admission shows, petty. Through the decades, Meredith has maintained a scrupulous honesty, a commitment to important subjects, and a technical facility that are truly rare, and can provide considerable pleasure to the reader. Effort at Speech is the chronicle of a maturing intelligence as it attempts to come to terms with its life and times.

Over the 40 years covered in this volume, Meredith's poetry has gradually articulated an idea of the good life. That idea is consciously modest, even bourgeois: Meredith values domestic happiness, the enjoyment of art and beauty, and "civilized" behavior, as expressed in morals and in manners. Poem after poem either delineates this vision or defends it against attack from the increasingly sloppy, rude, and selfish modern world. "Fables about Error," from his 1963 book The Wreck of the Thresher (one of the two best books represented in the volume), concludes with an exhortation to the reader:

What is as wrong as the uninstructed
heart?
Left to its ends, it clutches things and
creatures
That can't be held, or held, will slip
their natures;
It lives to hoard or to protect a hoard.
To school, to school! Teach the poor
organ skill
That all its ignorant, nervous will
Does not unpage us like old calendars.
A life should be all gathering and art.

This is admirable in its passion, its rightness, and its dexterity. And don't think that Meredith's good life, "all gathering and art," leaves no room for human foibles. "Five Accounts of a Monogamous Man," from the same book, shows that Meredith understands the indignities of everyday life and love:

Drôle de ménage, Rimbaud said of
himself and Verlaine,
As if there were any other kind. . . .

Keeping house is the instinct of love; it
is always a little ridiculous.
Yet it is with no light welcome we wel-
come the friends of the house.

Hazard, the Painter (1975), the other high point in the volume, also deals with Meredith's ideal of civilization; here, however, that ideal seems to be under threat. "Hazard" was clearly inspired by Berryman's The Dream Songs. Meredith's Hazard, like Berryman's Henry, is an alter ego who can speak with greater fluidity and freedom than the propria persona; he allows Meredith to comment, ruefully and a bit stridently, on the decline of American politics and culture. This is always a dangerous enterprise, and on occasion, as in "Rhode Island," Hazard can sound merely crotchety:

Why doesn't the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

But such outbursts are a part of what makes Hazard so vivid and sympathetic. It is only after "Hazard the Painter" that Meredith himself seems to narrow and sour a bit; his defense of "civilization" often leads him to lecture the reader, and one poem is even subtitled "A Tract." And the new poems included in this volume are largely minor ones that seem intended more as memoirs or epistles to friends than as public statements. Sadly, the poems stop in 1983; in that year, as Michael Collier informs us in his sympathetic introduction, Meredith suffered a stroke that impaired his speech and writing.

Effort at Speech is, then, a title with multiple implications. Most obviously, it is a definition of poetry -- the attempt to say something well and accurately. But it is also a poignant reminder of Meredith's plight -- he can no longer speak without a struggle -- and, ultimately, a statement of modesty; these poems are efforts, Meredith seems to say, but his best efforts. And those efforts have given us a book of clean, deft, intelligent verse. When one considers the state of poetry today, his accomplishment seems anything but minor.

Adam Kirsch works in the literary department of the New Republic.