Four Quartets Prize

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, or The Anniad
John Berryman, 77 Dream Poems, or His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

Winners receive a prize of $20,000; three finalists 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.

Year	Poet	Work
2021	'John Murillo	“A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
2021	Don Mee Choi	DMZ Colony
2021	Srikanth Reddy	Underworld Lit
2020	'Brian Teare	“Toxics Release Inventory ” from his collection Doomstead Days
2020	Ilya Kaminsky	Deaf Republic
2020	Prageeta Sharma	Grief Sequence
2019	'Dante Micheaux	The Circus
2019	Catherine Barnett	"Accursed Questions" from Human Hours
2019	Meredith Stricker	anemochore
2018	'Danez Smith	"summer, somewhere" from Don't Call Us Dead
2018	Geoffrey G. O'Brien	"Experience in Groups" from Experience in Groups
2018	Kathleen Peirce	Vault: a poem