• 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