The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University since 1917. The awards
are given on the recommendations of a board of jurors for Journalism, Letters,
Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry,
Biography or Autobiography, and History.
2008 (Two Winners)
Time and Materials by Robert Hass
Review
"The title suggests more hopefully that poetry is a craft, like carpentry: this book contains Hass's best and most careful verse in almost 30 years." New York Times
(read more)
Failure: Poems by Philip Schultz
Review
"Life goes on for Schultz, and he continues to write about it with greater conversational sweetness than any other American poet one can readily call to mind." Booklist (read more)
2007
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
Synopsis
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South — where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history. (read more)
2006
Late
Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson
Review
"Claudia Emerson's Late Wife tells the story of love lost and redeemed.
Her poetry explores the way we attach meaning to things without us and connect
them with our inner lives. In her hands heartbreak and healing turn as tangible
as the material world she observes with such love and such precision." Mark
Jarman (read more)
2005
Delights & Shadows by Ted
Kooser
Review
"Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger
for connection, our struggle to find balance." Poetry (read
more)
2003
Moy
Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon
Publisher Comments
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998),
finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County
Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the
banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. (read
more)
2002
Practical
Gods by Carl Dennis
Publisher Comments
Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed
poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth
Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply
moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (New
York Times). (read more)
2001 Different
Hours: Poems by Stephen
Dunn
2000 Repair:
Poems by C.
K. Williams
1999 Blizzard
of One: Poems by Mark
Strand
1998 Black
Zodiac: Poems by Charles
Wright
1997 Alive
Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel
Mueller
1996 Dream
of the Unified Field by Jorie
Graham
1995 The
Simple Truth: Poems by Philip
Levine
1994 Neon
Vernacular by Yusef
Komunyakaa
1993 Wild
Iris by Louise
Gluck
1992 Selected
Poems by James
Tate
1991 Near
Changes: Poems by Mona
Van Duyn
1990 The
World Doesn't End by Charles
Simic
1989 New
and Collected Poems by Richard
Wilbur
1988 Partial
Accounts: New & Selected Poems by William
Meredith
1987 Thomas
and Beulah: Poems by Rita
Dove
1986 Flying
Change: Poems by Henry
Taylor
1985 Yin:
New Poems by Carolyn
Kizer
1984 American
Primitive by Mary
Oliver
1983 A
New Selected Poems by Galway
Kinnell
1982 Colleced
Poems Reissue by Sylvia
Plath
1981 The
Morning of the Poem by James
Schuyler
1980 Selected
Poems by Donald
Rodney Justice
1979 Now
and Then: Poems 1976-1978 by Robert
Penn Warren
1978 Collected
Poems by Howard
Nemerov
1977 Divine
Comedies by James
Merrill
1976 Self
Portrait by John
Ashbery
1975 Turtle
Island by Gary
Snyder
1974 Dolphin by Robert
Lowell
1973 Up
Country by Maxine
Kumin
1972 The
Collected Poems by James
Arlington Wright
1971 The
Carrier of Ladders by William
S. Merwin
1970 Untitled
Subjects by Richard
Howard
1969 Of
Being Numerous by George
Oppen
1968 Hard
Hours by Anthony
Hecht
1967 Live
or Die by Anne
Sexton
1966 Selected
Poems 1930-1965 by Richard
Eberhart
1965 77
Dream Songs by John
Berryman
1964 At
the End of the Open Road by Louis
Simpson
1963 Pictures
From Brueghel and Other Poems by William
Carlos Williams
1962 Poems by Alan
Dugan
1961 Times
Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades by Phyllis
McGinley
1960 Heart's
Needle by W.
D. Snodgrass
1959 Selected
Poems 1928-1958 by Stanley
Kunitz
1958 Promises:
Poems 1954-1956 by Robert
Penn Warren
1957 Things
of This World by Richard
Wilbur
1956 North & South by Elizabeth
Bishop
1955 The
Collected Poems by Wallace
Stevens
1954 The
Waking by Theodore
Roethke
1953 Collected
Poems 1917- 1952 by Archibald
MacLeish
1952 Collected
Poems by Marianne
Moore
1951 Complete
Poems by Carl
Sandburg
1950 Annie
Allen by Gwendolyn
Brooks
1949 Terror
and Decorum: Poems 1940-1948 by Peter
Viereck
1948 The
Age of Anxiety by W.
H. Auden
1947 Lord
Weary's Castle by Robert
Lowell
1946 No award.
1945 V-Letter
and Other Poems by Karl
Shapiro
1944 Western
Star by Stephen
Vincent Benet
1943 A
Witness Tree by Robert
Frost
1942 The
Dust Which Is God by William
Rose Benet

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