The Saturday Review said of Poems (1961), the first volume by the native New Yorker Alan Dugan: "His poetry is a special way of looking at things. . . . Through personal experience of war he shapes universal messages, while he takes history, religion, and mythology and gives them an intimate meaning." This book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1962, and in the same year the poet won a fellowship in literature at the American Academy in Rome. The New York Times found that in Poems 2 (1963), Dugan reveals "a sharp eye for the sights and sounds of New York." In Poems 3, Dugan "writes with an anger at society that moves from artless outcry to black resignation in the face of the world's evils, and back again" (Saturday Review).
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