Daniel Schonning wins 2026 Four Quartets Prize

The T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America are pleased to announce that Daniel Schonning is the winner of the 2026 Four Quartets Prize for his collection As When Waking (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Selected by judges​ Paisley Rekdal,​ Charif Shanahan, and Brian Teare.

The judges also selected Juliana Spahr for “scotch broom” from Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) and Annie Wenstrup for The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) as finalists for the prize.

Schonning will receive $20,000, and each finalist will receive $1,000.

The Four Quartets Prize—which was launched in 2018, on the 75th anniversary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in a single volume in America, in 1943—is a celebration of the multipart poem, and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2025.

Judges’ Citation, Four Quartets Prize Winner

Daniel Schonning’s book takes the conceit of sequence literally and deploys it with the apparent ease of a virtuoso. To wit: the alphabet is a sequence, and the abecedarian a formal constraint, a twenty-six line poem that enjoins the poet to begin each line with a, b, c, etc., in order until the alphabet’s been spelled out. Schonning has written a sequence of twenty-six abecedarians; his sly innovation is that the first one starts with a, the second with b, the third with c, etc., each thereafter following the form’s slow rotation through the letters. And not only that – he has interspersed this central sequence with “little boxes,” lyric poems he calls “syllabic pangrams,” each of which contains all the letters of the alphabet. All of this technical prowess would merely be formal conceit if Schonning’s thematic concerns were not intimately tied up in questions raised by letters, sequence, and constraint. Instead, this work continues ancient metaphysical inquiries into the relationship between language and cosmology, letters and material phenomena, the making of poems and the making of the world. As When Waking, then, is a creation myth and a statement, ultimately, of faith: in language, in real things, and in the organic connection that might finally exist between them. Schonning’s skill transforms the abecedarian catalog into an ever-expanding enumeration of the world’s mysteries, leaving readers with the miraculous feeling that our hurt world has been restored by a lover of the real and of the good.

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Daniel Schonning is the author of As When Waking (University of Chicago Press, 2025), selected by Srikanth Reddy as part of the relaunched Phoenix Poets Series. His poetry has been published in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, POETRY Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith and serves as a poetry editor for Seneca Review.

Four Quartets Finalists

Juliana Spahr is the author of Ars Poeticas, which was awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Annie Wenstrup is Dena’ina poet and the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Awarded the 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, the tenth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and the Alaska Literary Award in 2023, Wenstrup is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow. She lives on the traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples in Fairbanks, Alaska.