The Illiterate

“The Illiterate” is an Italian sonnet written by American poet William Meredith, first published in Poetry Magazine in 1953. The poem was then included in Meredith’s third collection, The Open Sea and Other Poems (1958). It also appeared in his two subsequent collections of new and selected poems, Partial Accounts (1987)—which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—and Effort at Speech (1997)—which won the National Book Award. “The Illiterate,” which addresses one’s fears about love and its potential, is one of Meredith’s most famous and anthologized poems. The poem shows Meredith’s noted ease at maintaining form while still using contemporary speech.

While “The Illiterate” has several meanings, poet Jason Schneiderman points out that it is notable for being a gay love poem written “when same sex desire was heavily policed and criminalized” (See: Further Reading & Resources). Meredith’s sexual orientation was later widely acknowledged, and he became the first gay Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, serving from 1978-1980. This interpretation, along with the poem’s versatility to be read in multiple ways, gives “The Illiterate” an important place in the poetic canon of American literature.

Content Warning: The poem’s title references an outdated term for a learning/reading disability. The term is now considered offensive. This study guide reproduces the outdated term only in quoted material.

Poet Biography

William Morris Meredith, Jr., was born in New York City, New York, on January 9, 1919, to William Morris Meredith, Sr., and Nelley Keyser. Like his father and grandfather before him, Meredith attended Princeton University. He began writing poetry during college and graduated in 1940 after completing his senior thesis on the American poet Robert Frost.

Post-graduation, Meredith worked as a copy clerk for the New York Times newspaper for a year before joining the United States Army in 1941. In 1942, he transferred to the United States Navy and became a pilot. He served in the Pacific theater throughout World War II.

After the war, Meredith completed his first collection of poems, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, which was chosen for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1944. This secured him a job teaching at Princeton from 1946-1950. In 1948, he published his second collection, Ships & Other Figures. After a brief year of being an associate professor at the University of Hawaii (1950-1951), Meredith re-enlisted in the Navy to fly missions during the Korean War. He rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and received two Air Medals for meritorious achievement.

Beginning in 1955, Meredith served as a professor at Connecticut College. He published Open Sea and Other Poems in 1958. Besides poetry, Meredith was also an opera critic, dramatist, editor, and translator. In the 1960s, he produced The Wreck of the “Thresher” and Other Poems and taught at the Bread Loaf School, as well as at their summer Writers’ Conference from 1964-1971. He was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1964, a position that he held until 1987.

In 1970, Meredith met writer Richard Harteis, who would become his significant other and companion until his death. That same year, Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems was published. The collection Hazard, The Painter appeared in 1975. In 1978, Meredith was elected Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress. He was the first gay poet so honored. In 1979, he won the prestigious international poetry award, the Vaptsarov Prize. His collection The Cheer was released in 1980.

In 1983, Meredith sustained a debilitating stroke. This left him with expressive aphasia, a condition that affected his ability to process language. This caused his retirement from teaching. Months of rehabilitation later helped him to regain his speech. In 1987, Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems was published and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

In later years, he divided his time between Connecticut, Florida, and Bulgaria, where he and Harteis were given honorary citizenship in 1996 after editing a book on Bulgarian poets in 1992. In 1997, his last collection Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. Meredith died on May 30, 2007, at the age of 88 in New London, Connecticut.

Poem Text

Touching your goodness, I am like a man

Who turns a letter over in his hand

And you might think this was because the hand

Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man

Has never had a letter from anyone;

And now he is both afraid of what it means

And ashamed because he has no other means

To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,

Or his parents died before he sent them word,

Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.

Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.

What would you call his feeling for the words

That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

Meredith, William. “The Illiterate.” 1997. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

This lyric sonnet written in the Petrarchan form is the speaker’s direct address to another party after a physical experience. In the first stanza, the speaker touches the person’s “goodness” (Line 1) and then has a series of emotions that they relay through an extended simile. The speaker compares themselves to “a man” (Line 1) who has a reading disability and receives a “letter” (Line 2). The man has never received a letter before and experiences fear about what the letter says. The man also worries about what the letter’s contents might imply in terms of altering his life. He is “ashamed” (Line 7) that he can’t interpret the content himself. The man’s trepidation about the letter dominates the first stanza. The second stanza gives three choices for the potential contents of the letter. The speaker imagines the letter reveals the man’s inheritance, or his parents’ death, or perhaps that a “girl” (Line 11) has changed her mind about loving him. The man holds the letter close, remaining “[a]fraid and letter-proud” (Line 12). The poem ends with a question to the addressee about the contents of the unread letter and the definition of the man’s feelings. These feelings are equivalent to the speaker’s feelings regarding what has happened with the addressee.