Heart's Needle is the first book of poetry by American poet W.D. Snodgrass. Published in 1959, it won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1960.
"Heart's Needle" is also the title poem of that book.
By the time Heart's Needle was published in 1959, Snodgrass had already won The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most importantly of all, 1960's Pulitzer.
It has been said that Heart's Needle inaugurated confessional poetry. Snodgrass disliked the term. Still, it should be pointed out that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass's confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell.
External links[]
- Poem