RICHARD WILBUR - FIRST DAY COVER SIGNED CO-SIGNED BY: GALWAY KINNELL, W.D. SNODGRASS, STANLEY KUNITZ, LOUIS SIMPSON, ANTHONY E. HECHT - HFSID 181289

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AMERICAN POETS: RICHARD WILBUR, GALWAY KINNELL, WILLIAM SNODGRASS, STANLEY KUNITZ, LOUIS SIMPSON and ANTHONY HECHT
Six Pulitzer Prize winning poets sign a First Day Cover honoring Robert Frost.
First Day Cover signed: "Stanley Kunitz", "W.D. Snodgrass", "Louis Simpson", "Galway Kinnell", "Richard Wilbur" and "Anthony Hecht", 6½x3½. FDC honoring poet Robert Frost, postmarked Derry, New Hampshire, March 26, 1974, 10-cent stamp affixed, FIRST DAY OF ISSUE. ANTHONY HECHT, (1923-2004) published eight volumes of poetry between A Summoning of Stones (1954) and The Darkness and the Light (2001). His collection The Hard Hours (1967) won the Pulitzer Prize. Hecht is also an academic, teaching most recently at Georgetown University, an editor and literary critic. GALWAY KINNELL, (b. 1927), is an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his poetry collection Selected Poems (1982). Kinnell's poems examine primitive concepts like death, love and nature, their power over man, how civilization disconnects mankind from them and the urban dispossessed. His most well-known poems are St. Francis and the Sow and After Making Love We Hear Footsteps. He was also a member of the Council on Racial Equality in the 1960s and was arrested for his work on voter registration and workplace equality in Hammond, Louisiana. His long poem The Book of Nightmares draws from these experiences and his work in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. He has a total of 15 books of poetry, a novel Black Light (1966) and a children's book How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (1982). STANLEY KUNITZ (1905-2006), who had won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1928-1958, was named Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2000 at the age of 95. Over his career, which spanned nearly eight decades, Kunitz was also awarded the Bollingen Prize in poetry (1987), the National Medal of Arts (1993) and the National Book Award (1995), and he was appointed to a two-year term as the official New York State Poet in 1987, at the age of 81. Known for his poems that ranged from the intellectual to the lyrical to the confessional, Kunitz continued to write and give readings into his 90s. He had begun his career as a reporter and an editor before selling his poems to magazines. Compliations of his works include Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to War: A Selection of Poems (1944), Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995, National Book Award), The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978 (1979), Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985) and The Collected Poems (2000). Jamaican-born American poet LOUIS SIMPSON (1923-2012) won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for At the End of the Open Road, one of more than 17 volumes of verse he published, including The Best Hour of the Night. In 1975, with the publication of Simpson's Three on the Tower, a study of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (whom he mentions in this letter), the author won wide acclaim as a literary critic. His other books of criticism include A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (1978), A Company of Poets (1981), The Character of the Poet (1986) and Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994). Simpson, who had worked as a book editor at a publishing house in New York early in his career, later taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921), who became the second Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 1987 (following Robert Penn Warren), earned two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry: 1956, Things of This World; 1989, New and Collected Poems. One of his best-known poems is "The Prisoner of Zenda". WILLIAM DeWITT "W. D." SNODGRASS (b. 1926) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his first collection of poems, Heart's Needle. His most recent collection, Not for Specialists: New and Collected Poems, appeared in 2006. Snodgrass has also published three works of literary criticism and 6 volumes of poems in translation. Lightly worn at corners. Fine condition.