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Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. However, special citations for poetry were presented in 1918 and 1919.
This list is based on the website for the Pulitzer Prizes. Years link to corresponding "[year] in...
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Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson (December 22, 1869 – April 6, 1935) was an American poet, who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870. He described his...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was also known for her unconventional, bohemian lifestyle and her many love...
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Amy Lowell
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874—May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family. One...
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Leonora Speyer
Leonora Speyer, Lady Speyer (née von Stosch) (7 November 1872 – 10 February 1956) was an American poet and violinist.
She was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Count Ferdinand von Stosch of Mantze in Silesia, who fought for the Union.
She...
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George Dillon
George Hill Dillon (November 12, 1906 – May 9, 1968) was an American editor and poet. He was born in Jacksonville, Florida but he spent his childhood in Kentucky and the Mid-West. He graduated from The University of Chicago in 1927 with a degree in...
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Robert Hillyer
Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895-December 24, 1961) was an American poet.
He was born in East Orange, New Jersey. He attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut and graduated from Harvard in 1917, after which he went to France and volunteered...
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Audrey Wurdemann
Audrey Wurdemann was an American poet, and the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry at the age of 24, for her collection Bright Ambush. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She never attended grammar school and...
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Robert P. T. Coffin
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin (March 18, 1892 – January 20, 1955) was a writer, poet and professor at Wells College (1921-1934) and Bowdoin College (1934-1955). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936.
A native of Brunswick, Maine, and...
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Marya Zaturenska
Marya Zaturenska (1902–1982) was an American lyric poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.
She was born in Kiev and her family emigrated to the United States, when she was eight and lived in New York. Like many immigrants, she worked...
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John Gould Fletcher
John Gould Fletcher (January 3, 1886] – May 20, 1950) was a Pulitzer Prize winning Imagist poet and author. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas to a socially prominent family. After attending Phillips Academy, Andover Fletcher went on to Harvard...
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Mark Van Doren
Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic.
He was born in the town of Hope in Vermilion County, Illinois. The son of the county's doctor, he was raised on his family's farm in eastern...
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Leonard Bacon
Leonard Bacon was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, translator, and literary critic. He graduated from Yale University in 1909, and subsequently taught at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement in 1923. In 1923, he started...
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William Rose Benét
William Rose Benét (February 2, 1886 – May 4, 1950) was an American poet, writer, and editor. He was the older brother of Stephen Vincent Benét.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Col. James Walker Benét and his wife née Frances Neill...
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Stephen Vincent Benét
Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body (1928), for which he won a...
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Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He received the 1947...
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Peter Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006), was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and influential political thinker, as well as a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for five decades.
Viereck was born in New York, the...
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Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in...
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg ...
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Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was a Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.
Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle...
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a...
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/) who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of...
Conrad Aiken
Conrad Potter Aiken (5 August 1889 – 17 August 1973) was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography.
Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was eleven years of age, his physician...
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke (pronounced /ˈrɛtkə/ RET-kə) (May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963) was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his...
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish (7 May 1892 – 20 April 1982) was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois....
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946....
William De Witt Snodgrass
William De Witt Snodgrass (January 5, 1926 – January 13, 2009) was an American poet under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons. He won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
William De Witt Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and...
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Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 - February 22, 1978) was an U.S. writer of children's books and poet about the positive aspects of suburban life.
McGinley was born in Ontario, Oregon. At age 3, her family moved to Colorado, and on to Ogden, Utah...
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Richard Eberhart
Richard Ghormley Eberhart (April 5, 1904 – June 9, 2005) was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. He received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems: 1930-1965 and a...
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New...
Louis Simpson
Louis Aston Marantz Simpson (born March 27, 1923 in Jamaica) is an American poet. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At The End Of The Open Road.
His father was a lawyer of Scottish descent, and his mother Russian. At 17 he...
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Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts–October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an influential American poet and writer known for her highly personal, confessional poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her...
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George Oppen
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 - July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the...
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Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro (10 November 1913, Baltimore, Maryland – 14 May 2000, New York City) was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
Karl Shapiro attended the University of...
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John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.) (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the...
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (8 February 1911 – 6 October 1979) was an American poet and writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artist's retreat in Great...
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (born 1 March 1921) is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and...
James Wright
James Arlington Wright (December 13, 1927 – March 25, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale...
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James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist (if deeply emotional) lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic...
W. S. Merwin
William Stanley Merwin (New York City, September 30, 1927) is an American poet. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 80s and 90s, Merwin's writing...
Philip Levine
Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (29 February 1920 – 5 July 1991) was American poet, twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, and again from 1988 to 1990. He received the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for...
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler (9 November 1923 – 12 April 1991) was a major American poet in the late 20th century. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School of poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara,...
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Lisel Mueller
Lisel Mueller (born February 8, 1924) is an award-winning American poet.
She was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. Her father, Fritz Neumann, was a professor at Evansville College. Her mother died in 1953....
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author.
Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria...
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Anthony Hecht
Anthony Evan Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the...
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Charles Wright
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet.
Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, and attended Davidson College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Wright has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in...
Charles Simic
Dušan “Charles” Simić (Serbian: Душан "Чарлс" Симић) (IPA: [/ˈtʃ͡ɑːɻls ˈʂimitɕ͡/]) (born 9 May 1938) is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the...
Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell (born February 1, 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island) is one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the 20th century. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by...
Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Ashley Kizer (born December 10, 1925) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism.
"Kizer reaches into mythology in poems like “Semele Recycled”; into politics, into feminism,...
John Ashbery
John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets. In an article on Elizabeth Bishop in his Selected...
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (pronounced /ˈkjuːnɪts/) (29 July 1905 – 14 May 2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.
Kunitz was born in...
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born 28 August 1952) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1993, the first African American to be appointed, and received a second special appointment in...
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Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham (born May 9, 1950) is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. The U.S. Poetry Foundation suggests "She is perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard,...
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Mona Van Duyn
Mona Jane Van Duyn (9 May 1921 – 2 December 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1992.
Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora (pop. 3,200...
Donald Justice
Donald Justice (born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 - died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. He graduated from the University of Miami and went on to teach for many years at the Iowa Writers'...
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to...
James Tate
James Vincent Tate (born December 8, 1943) is an American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri and is a professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts.
Tate's writing...
Franz Wright
Franz Wright (born March 18, 1953) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
Born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at Oberlin College (1977), Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004 for his book Walking to Martha's Vineyard (ISBN 0-375...
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Richard Howard
Richard Howard (born October 13, 1929) is a distinguished American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he now teaches. He lives in New York City....
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep...
