Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1952

Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1951

Carl Sandburg won the Pulitzer for his book of Complete Poems.

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1950

Here are two poems by Gwendolyn Brooks:
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1949

Which Of Us Two?
When both are strong with tenderness, too wild
With oneness to be severance-reconciled;
When even the touch of fingertips can shock
Both to such seesaw mutuality
Of hot-pressed opposites as smelts a tree
Tighter to its dryad than to its own tight bark;
When neither jokes or mopes or hates alone
Or wakes untangled from the other; when
More-warm-than-soul, more-deep-than-flesh [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1948

Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1947

Skunk Hour
For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1945

The Voyage
The ship of my body has danced in the dance of the storm
And pierced to the center the heavy embrace of the tide;
It has plunged to the bottomless trough with the knife of its form
And leapt with the prow of its motion elate from the bride.
And now in the dawn I am salt with [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1944

Stephen Vincent Benét was the younger brother of William Rose Benét, who won the Pulitzer in 1942. This was the second Pulitzer for Stephen, who won the award in 1929 for John Brown’s Body. He died of a heart attack in 1943 and was awarded the second Pulitzer posthumously.
The following excerpt is from an article [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1943

Beech
Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods, an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth’s established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with [...]

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Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1942

People
I was painting dolphins on a silver sea
When a genial, jawful upstart came to me.
“Poof!” he cried. “A rum thing!
I foretell your fate.
Give the people something
They’ll appreciate!
People want the vital. People love the real.
Hence—your just requital! You are too ideal.
No one does as you do. Wise they grow—and rich!”
All I crooned was “Who do? Who [...]

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