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."
Background 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.
Eligibility The prize is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems. Examples of existing sequences that would fit the category:
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), or The Anniad (1950) John Berryman, 77 Dream Poems (1964), or His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968)
Winners receive a prize of $20,000; three finalists (including the eventual winner) receive $1,000 apiece. The prize does not require that nominees have an existing body of work or reach a certain age.
The Four Quartets Prize was first presented in 2018 to Danez Smith for their sonnet "summer, somewhere."
Four Quartets winners and finalists
Winners are listed first, highlighted and with a double dagger. YearPoetWork2025Dobby GibsonHold Everything (Graywolf Press)CAConrad Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books) Morgan Võ"To Market” from The Selkie (The Song Cave)2024Robyn SchiffInformation Desk: An Epic (Penguin)Dong Li The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press) Paisley RekdalWest: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press)2023Courtney Faye TaylorConcentrate (Graywolf Press)Brenda Hillman “The Sickness & the World Soul” from her collection In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan University Press) Gabriel Ojeda-SaguéMadness (Nightboat Books)2022Muriel Leung Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books)Desiree C. Bailey What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press) Forrest Gander“Twice Alive” from his book Twice Alive (New Directions)2021John 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 ReddyUnderworld Lit (Wave Books)2020Brian Teare“Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man)” from his collection Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books)Ilya Kaminsky Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press)Prageeta SharmaGrief Sequence (Wave Books)2019Dante MicheauxThe Circus (Indolent Books)Catherine Barnett"Accursed Questions" from Human Hours (Graywolf Press)Meredith Strickeranemochore (Newfound Press)2018Danez 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 PeirceVault: A Poem (New Michigan Press)
References
External links
The Four Quartets Prize at the Poetry Society of America official website