Poems Are Hard to Read gathers together a half-century of prose pieces written by William Meredith. The work includes essays on poetry and poets, reviews, occasional addresses, memoirs, and a Paris Review interview given shortly before his retirement. In Poems Are Hard to Read, Meredith skillfully recounts episodes in the lives of such poets as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, W. H. Auden, and Robert Frost, and depicts his interactions with these complex personalities against the cultural climate of the times.