W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after only one year in the public eye as a published poet. Born in Pennsylvania on 5th January 1926, William de Witt Snodgrass wrote under two pseudonymys; W.D. Snodgrass, an abbreviation of his own, rather unwieldy, name, and also S. S. Gordons. His writing career got off to a slow start; before he could attend college he was drafted into the Navy in 1944, during World War Two, and so could not commence his studies until 1946, when he enrolled in the writers' workshop at the University of Iowa.
After graduation he became a professor and enjoyed a long career, not retiring until 1994, to concentrate on his writing full time, although being what was technically a part-time writer had already garnered him many accolades and great respect from his peers. His first poems were published in 1951 in very prestigious magazines and journals but he made his mark in 1957 when Heart's Needle was published in the anthology New Poets of England and America. Snodgrass won The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry the same year, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize followed quickly afterwards.
Heart's Needle was an intensely personal poem, as it dealt with the loss of his daughter as a result of his divorce. It was also seen to usher in a new era of confessional poetry, which irritated Snodgrass intensely; confessional poetry concentrates on the individual person's thoughts, and catches them in a moment of psychological difficulty or struggle, and often hinted at mental instability or illness that was just never spoken about in the 1950s. Snodgrass's poems greatly influenced his contemporaries, particularly Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Despite his fame, and the fact he had won the most prestigious awards for his work, he almost shot his own career in the foot by publishing his Adolf Hitler Monologues, entitled The Fuhrer Bunker. Nobody was comfortable reading the fictionalized innermost thoughts of Hitler and his inner circle in the last vestiges of the Third Reich. The poem was released in serial form, drip-fed from 1977 over almost twenty years. The Monologues were also adapted into a stage play, ironically since Snodgrass had actually intended to be a playwright, and not a poet. Although critics praised the beauty of the way in which the poems were constructed, they were unanimaous in their dislike of the subject matter, considering that some subjects could not be made better by poetry.
Snodgrass passed away in 2009, at home in Erieville, New York, and remains one of the most influential American poets of the Twentieth Century.
