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."
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.
The prize is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems. Examples of existing sequences that would fit the category:
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."
Winners are listed first, highlighted and with a double dagger.
| Year | Poet | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | ‡Dobby Gibson | Hold Everything (Graywolf Press) |
| CAConrad | Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books) | |
| Morgan Võ | "To Market” from The Selkie (The Song Cave) | |
| 2024 | ‡Robyn Schiff | Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin) |
| Dong Li | The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press) | |
| Paisley Rekdal | West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press) | |
| 2023 | ‡Courtney Faye Taylor | Concentrate (Graywolf Press) |
| Brenda Hillman | “The Sickness & the World Soul” from her collection In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan University Press) | |
| Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué | Madness (Nightboat Books) | |
| 2022 | ‡Muriel 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) | |
| 2021 | ‡John 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 Reddy | Underworld Lit (Wave Books) | |
| 2020 | ‡Brian Teare | “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man)” from his collection Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books) |
| Ilya Kaminsky | Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) | |
| Prageeta Sharma | Grief Sequence (Wave Books) | |
| 2019 | ‡Dante Micheaux | The Circus (Indolent Books) |
| Catherine Barnett | "Accursed Questions" from Human Hours (Graywolf Press) | |
| Meredith Stricker | anemochore (Newfound Press) | |
| 2018 | ‡Danez 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 Peirce | Vault: A Poem (New Michigan Press) |