The date is not 1967
The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry did not do so in 1967. The Pulitzer poetry prize dates from the early 1920s, and there were related awards before that. Who counts as “first” therefore depends on whether those earlier awards are included, and this article does not claim a single certain answer.
The 1967 prize went to Anne Sexton for Live or Die, which makes that year a real moment for women poets, but not the beginning of the story.
Where the prize came from
The Pulitzer Prizes were first given in 1917, and poetry was not among the original categories. In 1918 and 1919, awards in poetry were made through an arrangement involving the Poetry Society of America and Columbia University. The Pulitzer organisation now lists these awards among its precursors. Sara Teasdale was honoured in 1918 for Love Songs, and Margaret Widdemer shared the 1919 award with Carl Sandburg.
The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the formal sense began in 1922, with Edwin Arlington Robinson as the winner. Edna St. Vincent Millay won the following year, in 1923, for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and other poems. So women were among the early recipients on either way of counting. If you count the precursor awards, the answer points to the 1918 and 1919 winners; if you count only the formal prize, it points to the 1923 winner.
The poetry boom behind it
The prize arrived at a lively time for American verse. In the years before and after the First World War, a number of new magazines, small presses and poetry societies encouraged writers. The Chicago magazine Poetry, founded in 1912, became one of the best-known outlets, and readers and lecture audiences for poetry were larger than they are often remembered to be.
Women poets were central to this scene, as writers, editors and organisers. The pattern resembles the one among the Pulitzer fiction winners of the same decade, where women also appeared early and often. That helps explain why the early prize lists include so many women, and it also shows that the question of a “first” is less revealing than the wider pattern. Women were part of American poetry from the start of the modern period.
Some women who followed
Without attempting a complete list, a few well-documented later winners show the range:
- Amy Lowell, honoured in 1926 after her death
- Marianne Moore, who won in 1952 for her collected poems
- Gwendolyn Brooks, who won in 1950 for Annie Allen and was the first Black writer to receive a Pulitzer in any category
- Elizabeth Bishop, honoured in 1956
- Anne Sexton, 1967
The list is a sample, and the exact titles and years are best checked against the official record if you need them for citation.
Anne Sexton and 1967
Sexton’s book, Live or Die, appeared in 1966 and is often discussed as part of the movement known as confessional poetry, where the poet writes openly about personal experience, family and mental distress. That openness was a change from the more guarded style of earlier decades, and it connected with a wider cultural shift toward frankness that also shaped the music and writing of the period.
Poetry in 1967 was not confined to books. Poets from the Beat Generation roots of the counterculture, Allen Ginsberg among them, were public figures, and poetry readings were part of events such as the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967. Singer-songwriters, including Bob Dylan, were prompting arguments about whether lyrics could be poetry, an argument that continues. The Pulitzer committee’s choice of Sexton in 1967 is a reminder that the prize, like the poetry scene itself, was becoming more personal and more varied.
Reading the question with care
When you see a claim about the first woman to win this prize, ask three questions. Which prize is meant? Which years does the source treat as the start? And does it count shared awards? Different answers to those questions can produce different names, and all of them can be defended.