Valley & State

Hayden Carruth, whose forceful observations of nature, hard work and mental illness brought him late acclaim as one of the most important poets of his generation, died Sept. 29 at his home in Munnsville, N.Y., after a series of strokes. He was 87.

Carruth lived for many years in rural Vermont and New York, where manual labor and an unforgiving climate became part of his daily life and, ultimately, his poetic voice.

Through years of isolation and neglect, he doggedly continued to write, gaining belated recognition for his more than 30 books. A 1996 Virginia Quarterly Review article described him as "certainly one of the most important poets working in this country today."

His Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry, and he won the National Book Award for the collection Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey in 1996. After decades of living hand to mouth, he won the $25,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1990 and the $50,000 Lannan Foundation literary award in 1995.

Carruth began writing at 6 and became a master of poetic diction, from the grandly formal to the bluntly vernacular. He wrote in a deceptively simple style that often evoked nature as he explored philosophical themes of sorrow, loneliness and human dignity.

"His poems take on a variety of voices: the farmers he lived among in Vermont, the jazzmen whose music he reveres, the ancient Chinese poets who taught him," author Lynne Sharon Schwartz wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 2005.

In 1953 and 1954, Carruth was treated in a New York mental hospital for 18 months for alcoholism and a nervous breakdown. He received electroshock therapy and emerged, he said, "in worse shape" than when he went in.

Seldom overtly political in his writing, Carruth nonetheless had strong views, which he expressed in an angry letter to the New York Times in 1971, after the newspaper's editorial about the Attica prison riot appeared on the same page as "my stupid poem about the flowers of summer."

Carruth was born Aug. 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Conn. His father and grandfather were journalists. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1943 and served in World War II.