The Four Quartets Prize is an award of the Poetry Society of America, presented annually since 2018 in partnership with the T. S. Eliot Foundation. It is "first and foremost a celebration of the multi-part poem, which includes entire volumes composed of a unified sequence as well as novels in verse and book-length verse narratives." [1]
The awards are named for T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, written over a four-year period. The award recognizes the 75th anniversary of Eliot's New York publisher first collecting them in a single volume in 1943. [2] [3]
The prize is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems. [4] Examples of existing sequences that would fit the category: [1]
Winners receive a prize of $20,000; three finalists (including the eventual winner) receive $1,000 apiece. [5] The prize does not require that nominees have an existing body of work or reach a certain age. [2]
The Four Quartets Prize was first presented in 2018 to Danez Smith for their sonnet "summer, somewhere."
Winners are listed first, highlighted and with a double dagger.
| Year | Poet | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | ‡ John Murillo | “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books) |
| Don Mee Choi | DMZ Colony (Wave Books) | |
| Srikanth Reddy | Underworld Lit (Wave Books) | |
| 2020 | ‡ Brian Teare | “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man)” from his collection Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books) |
| Ilya Kaminsky | Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) | |
| Prageeta Sharma | Grief Sequence (Wave Books) | |
| 2019 | ‡ Dante Micheaux | The Circus (Indolent Books) |
| Catherine Barnett | "Accursed Questions" from Human Hours (Graywolf Books) | |
| Meredith Stricker | anemochore (Newfound Press) | |
| 2018 [2] | ‡ Danez Smith | "summer, somewhere" from Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf Books) |
| Geoffrey G. O'Brien | "Experience in Groups" from Experience in Groups (Wave Books) | |
| Kathleen Peirce | Vault: a poem (New Michigan Press) |