The New York Times on the passing of W. D. Snodgrass:

W. D. Snodgrass, who found the stuff of poetry in the raw material of his emotional life and from it helped forge a bold, self-analytical poetic style in postwar America, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his debut book, died on Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., in rural Madison County. He was 83.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Kathleen Snodgrass, said.

“Your name’s absurd,” Mr. Snodgrass wrote in an early poem, “These Trees Stand...,” as if at once to silence the snickering and skewer himself. But only a few lines later he sang out his name, declaring, “Snodgrass is walking through the universe,” as if to announce the sort of poetic journey of the self he had undertaken.

It found immediate expression in “Heart’s Needle,” a collection he published at the age of 33 in 1959. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, startled American poetry circles and prompted a letter of praise from Robert Lowell.

Lowell, who had taught Mr. Snodgrass in a poetry workshop at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), had at first admonished his student about his early poems. “He said, ‘You’ve got a brain; you can’t write this kind of tear-jerking stuff,’ ” Mr. Snodgrass recalled in an interview with The New York Times at his home in October.

“But I came to a point where I had to rebel against my teachers, including Lowell,” he said. “I wanted to use a much more simple and direct kind of language, something that would be common without feeling worn out or used.”

Lowell changed his mind, persuaded Knopf to publish “Heart’s Needle” and called it a “breakthrough for modern poetry.”

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