Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems
by William Meredith
Summary
Partial Accounts draws together new poems with a wide selection from William Meredith's earlier books, giving a career spanning look at a poet who wrote steadily about friendship, war, and the toll of mental illness without ever raising his voice to do it. Meredith flew carrier planes in the Aleutian Islands and the Pacific during the Second World War and returned to active duty as a Navy pilot during the Korean War, and that military experience runs through the book, treated with the same restraint he brings to every other subject, never staged for drama.
Meredith favors a measured, civil tone and largely traditional forms, finding, across decades of work, that moral seriousness comes through understatement more reliably than through spectacle. Friendship recurs as a central subject, including poems that draw on his long personal relationship with Robert Frost, whom Meredith had studied and corresponded with since his college years. The book also addresses mental illness directly and without euphemism, material that reads as more urgent for arriving inside such a controlled, formally careful style rather than a confessional one.
Reading Partial Accounts rewards a reader who wants poetry that takes its subjects, war, friendship, breakdown, seriously without ever indulging in melodrama about any of them. It suits anyone drawn to a quieter, more civil strain of American poetry than the confessional mode that dominated the decades around it, and to a poet whose restraint reads, across an entire career gathered in one volume, as a considered moral stance rather than a limitation.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave William Meredith the 1988 Prize for Poetry for Partial Accounts, over finalists Lucille Clifton's combined volume Good Woman and Next: New Poems, and C. K. Williams's Flesh and Blood, the same Williams who would win the prize himself twelve years later. The book also won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, arriving five years after a 1983 stroke that had threatened to end Meredith's writing career altogether and from which he spent years recovering.
Meredith had written his Princeton senior thesis on Robert Frost, and the friendship that followed lasted the rest of Frost's life; Connecticut College's special collections still hold copies of Frost's poetry inscribed to Meredith, some with handwritten poems included. Meredith had served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, the position now called Poet Laureate, a role that recognized the same steady, decades long body of work Partial Accounts had just gathered.