Poet W.D. Snodgrass has died: he was 83. Snodgrass won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry and taught for nearly 40 years. He suffered from lung cancer.
His family said he died Tuesday at his home in Madison County, just east of Syracuse.
Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960 for his first book, "Heart's Needle," which grew from heartbreak at losing custody of his daughter in a bitter divorce.
Although widely credited as a founding member of the "confessional" school of poetry, Snodgrass himself dismissed the label.
Born William DeWitt Snodgrass in Wilkinsburg, Pa., on Jan. 5, 1926, he was known to friends throughout his life as "De," pronounced "dee." He briefly attended Geneva College in Pennsylvania before he was drafted into the Navy during the Second World War.
Although he aspired to a career in music before the war, Snodgrass enrolled afterward in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, hoping to become a playwright. Instead, he drifted into some poetry classes and studied with such greats as John Crowe Ransom, Karl Shapiro, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell.
Snodgrass wrote more than 30 books of poetry and translations. He taught at several colleges and universities, including Cornell and Syracuse University.
You can learn more about W.D. Snodgrass and his poetry
here.
