ThePulitzer Prize for Poetry is one of the seven AmericanPulitzer Prizes awarded annually for Letters, Drama, and Music. The award came five years after the first Pulitzers were awarded in other categories;[note 1]Joseph Pulitzer's will had not mentioned poetry.[1] It was first presented in 1922, and is given for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, published during the preceding calendar year.
Harriet Monroe, founding publisher and long-time editor ofPoetry magazine, wrote in an editorial (Apr.–Sept., 1922), "The award of a Pulitzer Prize of one thousand dollars to theCollected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson is a most agreeable surprise, as this is the first Pulitzer Prize ever granted to a poet. Four years ago, when thePoetry Society of America gave its first annual five hundred dollars toSara Teasdale'sLove Songs, the award, being made in conjunction with the Pulitzer prizes, was falsely attributed to the same origin."[1]
Finalists have been announced since 1980, ordinarily two others beside the winner.[2]
In its first 92 years to 2013, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded 92 times. Two were given in 2008, none in 1946.[2]Robert Frost won the prize four times and several others won it more than once (below).
Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times from 1924 to 1943.Edwin Arlington Robinson won three prizes during the 1920s and several people, all male, have won two.
Carl Sandburg won one of the special prizes for his poetry in 1919 and won the Poetry Pulitzer in 1951.
^Perhaps signaling her displeasure for being left in the dark and out of the loop about the matter,Harriet Monroe, publisher and editor ofPoetry magazine, wrote in an editorial (1922), "The initial award is of course worthy of all praise, though the committee may have regretted that they could not honor alsoMiss Millay'sSecond April. Indeed, the year 1921, presenting two such books, was singularly rich."Frank D. Fackenthal, who administered the Prizes, wrote back to say that the prize had been established by the Advisory Board of the School ofJournalism, not by a literary Board, at a meeting in May, 1921. TheColumbia School of Journalism had discontinued another prize, thereby freeing the funds (and of course could offer no authority as regarded thecritique of poetry).[1]
^In 1918-19,Columbia University managed both the Pulitzers and thePoetry Society of America's $500 annual award. After the Society discontinued its prize in 1920, the Pulitzer Advisory Board initiated an annual prize for poetry, putting up another $500 to provide a monetary award of $1,000.[1]
^The first poetry jury met inNew Haven on Feb. 11, 1922, and chose Robinson, withAmy Lowell andEdna St. Vincent Millay in competition. "Harriet Monroe, the influential editor ofPoetry: A Magazine of Verse, wasn't crazy about the choice, appearing to favor Millay, but her real beef was with the makeup of the jury that selected Robinson," according to the Pulitzer Prize website. The jury, consisting of just three members, considered 28 books in all; it was chaired byWilbur Lucius Cross. Cross and another juror favored Robinson, though the third juror preferred Lowell, followed by Millay andthen Robinson. In Cross's jury report, he cited this juror's "reluctant consent" for Robinson, perhaps delivered only to get the job over and done.Harriet Monroe looked at these jurors – Cross, a busy man who was aYale University literature professor yet also a politician who served asConnecticut's Governor for two terms; Richard Burton, a drama critic and reviewer of novels; andFerris Greenslet, who was by trade a librarian and an associate editor ofThe Atlantic Monthly, but chiefly abiographer – and her opinion was plain: "Though we cannot criticize the verdict in this case, we must repeat once more our plea that all juries should be strictly professional, and that poets alone have the right and the authority to award honors in their art."[1]
^The Jury consisted ofCharles Wright,Bonnie Costello andFrank Bidart. Their consensus read: "Louise Glück'sThe Wild Iris is a book with a solitary, almost monastic vision. A kind of devotional poetry, it recalls the metaphysical tradition of the early 1600s, particularly the poetGeorge Herbert. The poems themselves take place entirely within a garden, with the Christian motif of suffering and redemption, death and resurrection much in evidence. It is a book of intense inward rapture where lyric values, pure lyric values of voice and spiritual meditation, predominate, and its appearance secures for Glück a high place indeed in contemporary American poetry."[18]
^The Jury consisted ofMary Oliver, Calvin Bedient andMichael S. Harper. Their consensus read: "The poems of Yusef Komunyakaa are deeply felt and experienced, often narrating the author’s memory of childhood, his time in Vietnam, or an emotion – often melancholy – that is salved by music and/or love. His poems resonate with vigorous vocables, with great musical range and nuance; his poetic navigations of intense quiet and gentleness move subtly by leaps of truth-telling and song."[18]
^The Jury consisted ofMark Strand,Louise Glück andCharles Wright. They praised Levine's book, "in which small domestic loss and the grand erasures of time seem inextricable. Mr. Levine, whose gifts have never seemed more evident, has combined narrative grace and humor to form one of the most moving sequences of elegies in recent American poetry."[18]
^The Jury consisted ofFrank Bidart,Bonnie Costello andJohn Wheatcroft. Their consensus: "Jorie Graham'sThe Dream of the Unified Field, selected from work published from 1974 to 1994, is a significant volume in its own right. It clarifies the superb achievement of one of America's most accomplished writers – the boldness of Graham's aesthetic innovation, the freshness with which she explores the central themes that have from the beginning dominated her work. No contemporary has explored more subtly or movingly the conflict between idea ("perfection") and manifestation (at best "perfect instances"), or invented with greater resource a prosody adequate to it."[18]
^The Jury consisted ofRita Dove,Mary Karr and Alan Williamson. Their consensus reads: "Mueller often writes about intense psychological states or perceptions. But her best work is transcendent in a lyric mode that evokesRilke. She uses vivid imagery to augment linguistic and philosophical truths in forms that are both precise and super poetic – the language and what's being said are impossible to unravel. In 'Snow,' the whiteness of earth and heaven join at the poem's end – a breath-taking turn that brings a backwash of insight: 'We are covered with stars./Feel how light they are, our lives.' She's also capable of meditative brilliance, as in 'Place and Time,' which begins offhandedly with listening to a radio talk show, then leaps into more metaphysical ponderings: '[T]he lives we live/before the present moment/are graves we walk away from/Except we don't. We're all/pillars of salt. My life began/with Beethoven and Schubert/on my mother's grand piano.../[It] burned with our city in World War II.' Here as elsewhere, she sets average memory next to historical horror, the metaphysical next to the quotidian. Her political poems never fall into being pedantic, and her flourishes of linguistic wit are worthy ofPope. Her virtuosity rests partly in unadorned speech, for Mueller does not indulge in linguistic embroidery for its own sake. Her emotional intention is more radical than that: She often writes as if to inspire spiritual hope. These subtle poems grow more resonant with rereading."[18]
.png)
Media related toPulitzer Prize for Poetry winners at Wikimedia Commons
