Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet laureate of Vermont who imbued her works about the natural world, family, community and other subjects with musical rhythms and syntactic precision, died on Oct. 23 in Berlin, Vt. She was 82.
Her death, in a hospital near her longtime home in Cabot, Vt., was confirmed by her daughter, Dudley Voigt, who did not provide a cause. She said her mother had a stroke in 2018 but largely recovered.
Ms. Voigt wrote nine volumes of poetry, starting with “Claiming Kin” (1976) and concluding with “Collected Poems” (2023). She was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for “Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006” and a finalist for the National Book Award for “Messenger” and “Shadow of Heaven” (2002).
“I don’t think of music and narrative as being mutually exclusive,” Ms. Voigt told the London-based literary magazine Granta in 2013, in explaining her approach. “Some of my poems ARE narrative, and are as ‘sound-driven’ as the lyrics, as least in the making of them. With a few experimental exceptions, almost every poem in the language contains, importantly, aural properties, whether or not these are overt, foregrounded.”
Speaking to “PBS NewsHour” after being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, she said, “If I can hear a line that is intriguing and is interesting rhythmically, then I think I’ll follow it toward my 50 to 100 drafts, which is about how long it takes me to do a poem.”
In a profile of Ms. Voigt in The New York Times in 2007, the critic and essayist Sven Birkerts praised her “highly tempered poetic intelligence, most obviously in her line-by-line determination to align evocative images with their emotional incentives.” He took note of her poem “Snakeskin,” in which she wrote, in part:
Down on the porch, the blacksnake sits like a thick fist. His back is flexed and slick. The wedge of his forehead turns to the sun. He does not remember the skin shucked in the attic, the high branches of our family tree.
Her upbringing on a farm in Virginia was a formative experience, which gave her an appreciation for her father’s toil, which she expressed in “The Farmer.” She wrote, in part:
These fields were why he farmed— he walked the fenceline like a man in love. The animals were merely what he needed: cattle and pigs; chickens for awhile; a drayhorse, saddlehorses he was paid to pasture— an endless stupid round of animals, one of them always hungry, sick, lost, calving or farrowing, or waiting slaughter.
The larger purpose of her poetry, she said in a video on the MacArthur website, was to “capture something of the world and the human experience of living in the world, which is fraught. It’s fraught, it’s challenging, it’s complicated. It seems to me that poetry is able to capture some of those complications in a way that none of the arts exactly do.”
Ellen Yeatts Bryant was born on May 9, 1943, in Danville, Va., and grew up in nearby Chatham. Her mother, Missouri (Yeatts) Bryant, was a schoolteacher, and her father, Lloyd, was a mail carrier and a farmer.
Ellen played the piano from a young age when she wasn’t handling chores. In one of her poems, she wrote:
At the piano, the girl, as if rowing upstream is driving triplets against the duple meter, one hand for repetition, one hand for variation and for song. She knows nothing, but Bach knows everything.
She initially studied music on a scholarship at Converse College (now University) in Spartanburg, S.C., but turned to poetry when a friend introduced her to the works of John Keats, William Butler Yeats, E.E. Cummings and Rainer Maria Rilke.
She graduated in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in English, then received a master of fine arts degree in 1966 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she met her future husband, Francis Voigt.
She taught at several universities and, in 1976, started the low-residency M.F.A. writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., which allowed students to work mostly from home, with limited time on campus. The program moved in 1981 to Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, N.C., where she taught until 2018. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978.
In a tribute to Ms. Voigt in The Yale Review after her death, the writer Meghan O’Rourke wrote that Ms. Voigt “was passionately interested in the ways poems could be both narrative and lyric, and in how syntax created clues that shaped those ‘latent narratives,’ as she called them, undergirding lyric poems.”
She added: “She was more alert to the implications of syntax — eventually writing a book about it — than anyone I’ve ever met.”
In addition to her poetry collections, Ms. Voigt wrote about poetic technique in “The Flexible Lyric” (1999) and “The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song” (2009).
In 1999, Ms. Voigt was named Vermont’s poet laureate for a four-year term. It was a position previously held by luminaries like Robert Frost and Grace Paley.
She started a project, the Poet Next Door, which brought Vermont writers like Sydney Lea, a Pulitzer finalist, into high school classrooms to give readings and discuss their work. Ms. Voigt wanted to show students that “poetry is being written down the street and that poetry can be made from the experience of their lives,” she told The Burlington Free Press in 2002.
Her husband, a college administrator and a founder of the New England Culinary Institute, died in 2018. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Voigt is survived by a son, Will; a sister, Joan Shelton; a brother, L.G. Bryant; and three grandchildren.
“Kyrie: Poems” (1995), was one of her best-known books, a suite of sonnets about the impact of the global influenza epidemic of 1918 on a small community. Writing in The Boston Globe, Liz Rosenberg compared “Kyrie” to Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” (1915) — a series of free verse, dramatic monologues spoken by dozens of a fictional town’s dead citizens — “for its portrait of a town, the sense of losses, the voices of the dead speaking through these poems.”
In one sonnet, Ms. Voigt ran down a litany of the departed (“the barber, the teacher, the plumber, the preacher, the man in a bowler” and others), then concluded:
O, O, the world wouldn’t stop — the neighborhood grocer, the neighborhood cop laid them down and never did rise. And some of their children, and some of their wives, fell into bed and never got up, fell into bed and never got up.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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