William Harmon was born in Concord, North Carolina, a small cotton-mill town northeast of Charlotte. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, he entered the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1958 and spent the next six years in the United States Navy, the last in Vietnam. As an adviser to the South Vietnamese Navy, he wrote its Standard Ship's Organization Manual. After returning to the United States, he pursued post-graduate work (focused predominantly on trans-Atlantic modernist poetry) at the University of Chicago, where he earned his master's degree in 1968; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned an additional master's the same year; and the University of Cincinnati, where he earned his doctorate in 1970. The same eventful year, his dissertation on Ezra Pound was published by the University of North Carolina Press and he was hired by the University, where he has remained on the faculty since 1970. His first book of poetry, Treasury Holiday, was also published in 1970 by Wesleyan University Press and became the Lamont Poetry Selection of the year. His most recent collection of poetry, Mutatis Mutandis: 27 Invoices, won the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1985.

Harmon donated an extensive set of correspondences (over 10,000 items, deemed the William Harmon Papers) to the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library (located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina). The letters document Harmon's discussions with a range of other poets including A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, John Hollander, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Penn Warren.

Poetry

• Mutatis Mutandis: 27 Invoices (1985)
• One Long Poem (1982)
• The Intussusception of Miss Mary America (1976)
• Legion: Civic Choruses (1973)
• Treasury Holiday : Thirty-Four Fits for the Opening of the Fiscal Year (1970)

Edited Anthologies

• A Handbook to Literature (5th - 11th Editions) (1984 - 2009)
• Classic Writings on Poetry (2005)
• The Classic Hundred: All-Time Favorite Poems (2nd Edition) (1998)
• The Top 500 Poems (1992)
• The Oxford book of American light verse (1979)

Literary Criticism

• Time in Ezra Pound's Work (1977)