SYRACUSE, N.Y. - W.D. Snodgrass, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a nearly 40-year teaching career, died Tuesday in his upstate New York home after a four-month battle with lung cancer. He was 83.
Mr. 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, Mr. Snodgrass dismissed the label.
Born William DeWitt Snodgrass in Wilkinsburg, Pa., he was known to friends throughout his life as De, pronounced "dee."
Mr. Snodgrass enrolled in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, hoping to become a playwright. Instead, he drifted into poetry classes and studied with such greats as John Crowe Ransom, Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell.
Lowell had at 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 said in October. "But I came to a point where I had to rebel against my teachers, including Lowell. 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."
Mr. Snodgrass's nearly 40-year teaching career included stints at Cornell University, Wayne State University, Old Dominion University, and Syracuse University. He retired from teaching in 1994.
Mr. Snodgrass was the author of more than 30 books of poetry and translations.
Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.