- 1918 Sara Teasdale - Love Songs
- 1919 Margaret Widdemer - Old Road to Paradise and Carl Sandburg - Corn Huskers
- 1920 no award given
- 1921 no award given
- 1922 Edwin Arlington Robinson - Collected Poems
- 1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver: A Few Figs from Thistles: Eight Sonnets in American Poetry, 1922. A Miscellany
- 1924 Robert Frost - New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
- 1925 Edwin Arlington Robinson - The Man Who Died Twice
- 1926 Amy Lowell - What's O'Clock
- 1927 Leonora Speyer - Fiddler's Farewell
- 1928 Edwin Arlington Robinson - Tristram
- 1929 Stephen Vincent Benet - John Browns Body
- 1930 Conrad Aiken - Selected Poems
- 1931 Robert Frost - Collected Poems
- 1932 George Dillon - The Flowering Stone
- 1933 Archibald Macleish - Conquistador
- 1934 Robert Hillyer - Collected Verse
- 1935 Audrey Wurdemann - Bright Ambush
- 1936 Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Strange Holiness
- 1937 Robert Frost - A Further Range
- 1938 Marya Zaturenska - Cold Morning Sky
- 1939 John Gould Fletcher - Selected Poems
- 1940 Mark Van Doren - Collected Poems
- 1941 Leonard Bacon - Sunderland Capture
- 1942 William Rose Benet - The Dust Which Is God
- 1943 Robert Frost - A Witness Tree
- 1944 Stephen Vincent Benet - Western Star
- 1945 Karl Shapiro - V-Letter and Other Poems
- 1946 No award given.
- 1947 Robert Lowell - Lord Weary's Castle
- 1948 W. H. Auden - The Age of Anxiety
- 1949 Peter Viereck - Terror and Decorum
- 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks - Annie Allen
- 1951 Carl Sandburg - Complete Poems
- 1952 Marianne Moore - Collected Poems
- 1953 Archibald MacLeish - Collected Poems 1917-1952
- 1954 Theodore Roethke - The Waking
- 1955 Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems
- 1956 Elizabeth Bishop - Poems - North & South''
- 1957 Richard Wilbur - Things of This World
- 1958 Robert Penn Warren - Promises: Poems 1954-1956
- 1959 Stanley Kunitz - Selected Poems 1928-1958
- 1960 W. D. Snodgrass - Heart's Needle
- 1961 Phyllis McGinley - Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades
- 1962 Alan Dugan - Poems
- 1963 William Carlos Williams - Pictures from Breughel
- 1964 Louis Simpson - At The End Of The Open Road
- 1965 John Berryman - 77 Dream Songs
- 1966 Richard Eberhart - Selected Poems
- 1967 Anne Sexton - Live or Die
- 1968 Anthony Hecht - The Hard Hours
- 1969 George Oppen - Of Being Numerous
- 1970 Richard Howard - Untitled Subjects
- 1971 William S. Merwin - The Carrier of Ladders
- 1972 James Wright - Collected Poems
- 1973 Maxine Kumin - Up Country
- 1974 Robert Lowell - The Dolphin
- 1975 Gary Snyder - Turtle Island
- 1976 John Ashbery - Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
- 1977 James Merrill - Divine Comedies
- 1978 Howard Nemerov - Collected Poems
- 1979 Robert Penn Warren - Now and Then
- 1980 Donald Justice - Selected Poems
- 1981 James Schuyler - The Morning of the Poem
- 1982 Sylvia Plath - The Collected Poems
- 1983 Galway Kinnell - Selected Poems
- 1984 Mary Oliver - American Primitive
- 1985 Carolyn Kizer - Yin
- 1986 Henry Taylor - The Flying Change
- 1987 Rita Dove - Thomas and Beulah
- 1988 William Meredith - Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems
- 1989 Richard Wilbur - New and Collected Poems
- 1990 Charles Simic - The World Doesn't End
- 1991 Mona Van Duyn - Near Changes
- 1992 James Tate - Selected Poems
- 1993 Louise Gluck - The Wild Iris
- 1994 Yusef Komunyakaa - Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
- 1995 Philip Levine - The Simple Truth
- 1996 Jorie Graham - The Dream of the Unified Field
- 1997 Lisel Mueller - live Together: New and Selected Poems
- 1998 Charles Wright - Black Zodiac
- 1999 Mark Strand - Blizzard of One
- 2000 C.K. Williams - Repair
- 2001 Stephen Dunn - Different Hours
- 2002 Carl Dennis - Practical Gods