he enrolled in Geneva College, now called
Hobert College, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
His studies there were interrupted when he was
drafted during World War II. He went into the
U.S. Navy and served in the Pacific. After his
discharge from the navy in 1946, he continued
his education at the University of Iowa, where he
enrolled in the college’s internationally famous
Writers’ Workshop program. He earned a mas-
ter’s degree in fine arts from Iowa in 1953. He
married the first of his four wives, Lila Jean
Hank, in 1946; their divorce in 1953, and Snod-
grass’s subsequent losses in the battle for cus-
tody of their daughter, Cynthia Jean, were
frequent subjects of his poetry during that
period, which was one of the reasons why he
came to be categorized in the confessional school
of poetry.
Snodgrass started publishing poetry in the
1950s, appearing in the most prestigious literary
magazines of the time, including the New
Yorker, Partisan Review, and the Hudson
Review. In 1957 he established himself as one of
the most important rising stars on the American
poetry scene when a long section of ‘‘Heart’s
Needle’’ was published in an anthology called
New Poets of England and America, edited by
Donald Hall, Louis Simpson, and Robert Pack.
Snodgrass won several prestigious awards
before his first book of poetry was published,
including the Ingram Merrill Foundation
Award in 1958, the Longview Foundation Liter-
ary Award for 1959, and the Hudson Review
Fellowship in Poetry for 1958–1959. His first
published poetry collection, Heart’s Needle,
was published in 1959 and received a citation
from the Poetry Society of America, a grant
from the National Institute of Arts, the 1960
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the British Guin-
ness Award in 1961.
After the success ofHeart’s Needle, Snod-
grass published his next book,Remains, under
the pen name S. S. Gardons. This alternate iden-
tity was one that he did not try very hard to keep
a secret, and later, after the deaths of both of his
parents (whom the book was about), he talked
about his pseudonymous work openly and reis-
suedRemainsunder his own name.
In the following decades, Snodgrass taught
at several colleges and universities. His longest-
lasting association was with the University of
Delaware, Newark, where he was a distinguished
visiting professor from 1979 to 1980 and a dis-
tinguished professor of creative writing and con-
temporary poetry from 1980 to 1994; since then
he has been a distinguished professor emeritus.
He has published numerous books of poetry,
several plays, and several collections of literary
essays. He has been awarded some of the most
prestigious fellowships available to poets,
including fellowships from the Academy of
American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Gug-
genheim Foundation, the National Institute of
Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment
for the Arts. As of 2008, Snodgrass was retired,
splitting his time between Erieville, New York,
and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. His most
recent publication wasNot for Specialists: New
and Selected Poems(2006).Poem Summary
Epigraph
After dedicating ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’ to his daugh-
ter, Snodgrass begins with a passage from the
Irish legend of Suibhne. Suibhne, a Gaelic ver-
sion of the name Sweeney, was a king of UlsterW. D. Snodgrass(Joan Liffring / Pix Inc. / Time & Life Pictures /
Getty Images)
Heart’s Needle