Although Carl Dennis is one of the most prolific and successful American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, he came relatively late to poetry. His first collection did not appear until he was in his mid-thirties. Before then and after, Dennis, a career academic, published literary criticism in prestigious academic journals. As Dennis’s national reputation as a poet grew, so did interest in his critical writings. He drew on nearly a quarter century of his publications to fashion Poetry as Persuasion (2001). The volume, dealing with writers such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats, argued for the importance of voice in a poem, how a poet must define a specific voice to establish an effective intimacy with a reader. The book also offered practical advice for working poets on using irony, point of view, symbols, and rhythm and rhyme in free verse to achieve a resonant and stable voice in a poem.

In a body of poetry marked by a subtly musical, almost conversational voice, Carl Dennis, profoundly influenced by a spiritual perception of the material universe, draws on everyday experiences to distill from them quiet and understated insights that create an intimacy with the reader. In the first few decades of his career, he published regularly, and his verse drew critical praise but did not enjoy a wider success. He was a poet’s poet. He received the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest (1980) and the Bess Hokin Prize (1995) and the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize (1997), both from Poetry magazine. He was awarded a variety of fellowships, most notably from the Guggenheim Foundation (1984), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988), and the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy (1988). However, his stature as a poet grew, beginning in 2000, when he was selected for the prestigious $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually to a poet for lifetime achievement. Then, in 2002, his Practical Gods was the surprise choice for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.