American poet and Poet Laureate, William Meredith, led a life that offered variety in experience, and his poetry reflects this. His gift of mastering a wide range of poetic forms, including the villanelle, sestina, ballad, and sonnet, allowed his work to be accessible to a large audience. His style is controlled, his words carefully crafted. His work deals with diverse topics, including daily life (and the chaos it can bring), love, art, life and death, as well as nature themes. He is known for a quiet, contemplative style.

He was born in New York City and raised in Connecticut. Upon high school graduation he enrolled at Princeton University, graduating in 1940. He then briefly worked as a reporter for the New York Times, through which he was able to network and meet a number of prominent poets of the day. In 1942 he was off to war, serving in the Army Air Corp. He was stationed in Alaska and then Hawaii. Both exotic locations informed some of his early poetry and resulted in his first published collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land. Later, this collection would be chosen to be published as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Following the war, he took a position as an instructor of English at Princeton. In 1950 he accepted a position as associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii, but two years later he had to resume duty in the Air Corp, where he was awarded two Air Medals. Upon his return from the Korean War, he took a teaching position at Connecticut College, and achieved full professor status in 1964.

For more than two decades he served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Upon his retirement in 1989, he served as chancellor emeritus until his death in 2007. He was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and the 1980 International Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry. He was also awarded a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1983, he suffered a stroke that immobilized him for two years and left him with speech challenges. During his time of illness and until his death he was cared for by his partner, the poet and fiction writer Richard Harteis. Despite the stereotypical image of the tragic poet, Meredith never sought death. Indeed, he fought his illness to the very end. He was considered by some of his peers to be the only poet of his generation who was not suicidal. His wish for other poets and all people was to have cheer, which he defined as morale, confidence, and courage.