Poet William Jay Smith has died. He was 97 years old.
Smith (pictured, via) served as the United States poet laureate from 1968 to 1970. Throughout his writing career, he published several volumes of poetry including Celebration at Dark (1950), Boy Blue’s Book of Beasts (1957), and The Tin Can and Other Poems (1966).
Here’s more from The New York Times: “Mr. Smith’s poems for adults were praised for diction that was at once unfussy and lyrical; for thematic variety (they ranged over the natural world, erotic love, the experience of war, his Choctaw ancestry and many other subjects); for their ability to see minutely into everyday experience; and for a deceptive simplicity that belied the rigorous formal architecture beneath. He embraced poetic devices, like rhyme and carefully calibrated meter, that many 20th-century colleagues considered passé — a self-imposed set of strictures that, critics said, gave his best work the sheen of something meticulously constructed, buffed and polished.”