Nationally Acclaimed Poet and Literary Great, Ellen Bryant Voigt ’64, Dies at 82

Written by Amanda Mathis

Words were like a friend for many decades to Ellen Bryant Voigt ’64, an award-winning poet and literary great who passed away on October 23, 2025, in Berlin, VT, at the age of 82.

Born in Danville, VA, on May 9, 1943, Ellen was the daughter of a schoolteacher and a farmer and grew up on a rural farm. Brought up in a musical household, she played the piano from a young age, which led her to Converse College (now University) in 1960, where she received a scholarship to study music at the conservatory and to become a high school band director.

But then the trajectory of her life changed.

“I came to Converse because of the School of Music, and had not even written my first poem. The faculty members of the English department ignited that spark.”

Ellen Bryant Voigt ’64,

“I came to Converse because of the School of Music, and had not even written my first poem,” Ellen reflected during her 2003 interview with Converse. “The faculty members of the English department ignited that spark.”

Converse’s English department introduced Ellen to the works of John Keats, William Butler Yeats, E.E. Cummings, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and her world clicked into place. Within the halls of Converse, her love for poetry grew so much that she changed her major to English.

Her love for words grew.

“What I have always loved about poetry is its two rhythmic systems—the rhythm of the sentence, which is the given, how we think, how we make meaning; and the rhythm of the poetic line, which is wholly artifice, made by the poet every time, in every poem, in every line—and the relationship between them. And yet, my preoccupation and my allegiance had been with and to line, not sentence,” she shared in her 2013 interview with The Rumbus, an online literary and culture magazine. 

After graduating from Converse in 1964, Ellen achieved a master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 1966. She didn’t stop there; she taught hundreds of students at various universities and, in 1976, established a low-residency MFA writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT. This program allowed students to work mostly from home, with limited time on campus. The program moved in 1981 to Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, NC, where she taught until 2018. She was recognized as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978.

Known for speaking about the natural world, family, community, and other subjects with musical rhythms and syntactic precision, Ellen became nationally known as the poet with the musical ear.

Ellen is the author of nine collections of poetry: The Collected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2023); Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2013); Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton, 2007); Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton, 2002), a finalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (W.W. Norton,1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Two Trees (W.W. Norton, 1992); The Lotus Flowers (W.W. Norton,1987); The Forces of Plenty (W.W. Norton, 1983); and Claiming Kin (Wesleyan University press, 1976). Her collections of poetry essays are The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009). Her work “Kyrie: Poems,” written in 1995, is considered her best-known book, focusing on the impact of the 1918 global influenza epidemic within a small community. 

Education was essential to Ellen as she began her legacy project, the Poet Next Door, that infused the high school classroom with poetry, including notable Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea.

David Baker from the Los Angeles Review of Books described Voigt as “one of the most significant poets writing today.”

Education was essential to Ellen as she began her legacy project, the Poet Next Door, that infused the high school classroom with poetry, including notable Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea. Her goal was to open students’ minds to poetry and show them 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.

With success came rewards.

In 1999, Ellen was chosen as Vermont’s poet laureate for a four-year term, a position previously held by poetic greats like Grace Paley and Robert Frost.

During her career, she was recognized with multiple Pushcart Prizes in 2003 and 2006, which honor the “best of the small presses” in poetry, short fiction, essays, and literary nonfiction. In 2002 and 2007, Ellen was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work received additional awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Poets’ Prize, the 2002 Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library; grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. 

In 2015, she was selected as the second Vermont state poet to receive a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, a “no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”

“And it seems to me that poetry is able to capture some of those complications in a way that none of the other arts exactly do,” said Ellen in a 2015 interview with the Burlington Free Press.

As Converse’s Founders Day speaker in 2016, she reflected during her speech that, “creative thinking is very hard work. It doesn’t swagger. It is full of self-doubt. It doesn’t dazzle in the blogosphere. It keeps you circling and idling, going nowhere, and yet it is what drives any field of inquiry forward – whether the sciences or humanities, social sciences or the arts. Because what it circles toward with diligence and a little luck is a thrilling discovery – some congruence between almost any disparate objects you choose to observe. No matter where you enter the web, you can find the spider.”

Predeceased by her husband, Francis (Fran) Voigt, who passed in 2018, Ellen is survived by her daughter, Dudley Voigt, and son, Will Voigt.