The Wreck of the Thresher, published in 1964, was the book which 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 Wreck of the Thresher reveals unobtrusive mastery of craft traditionally conceived; it is not full of 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 book consistently offers the voice of a civilized man, a man with good but not flashy manners, engaged in encounters with matters of inexhaustible interest.

This style did not come quickly to Meredith...