W.D. Snodgrass, 83, a Poet of Intensely Autobiographical Themes, Is Dead

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.

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

W. D. Snodgrass at a reading at Emory University last April.

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.