Robyn Schiff Wins 2024 Four Quartets Prize

The T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America are pleased to announce that Robyn Schiff is the winner of the 2024 Four Quartets Prize for her collection Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin Poets, 2023).

She was selected by judges Catherine Barnett, Eduardo C. Corral, and D. A. Powell.

The judges also selected Dong Li's The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Paisley Rekdal's West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) as finalists for the prize.

Robyn Schiff 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 first and foremost a celebration of the multipart poem, and is awarded to a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2023.

Judges’ Citation, Four Quartets Prize Winner

Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk wanders the halls of both the physical space of the museum and the interior movements of the mind. It lives in the unknown questionings that are punctuated by almost obsessive meditations on the lives of wasps as she speaks of art, power, family, imagination, and the ways in which a life is constructed as meaning is constructed.

Both the syntax and the interventions of the line breaks keep us moving forward while encountering surprise after surprise, whether it be anecdotal memory, historical fact, or meditations on the making of art (“art history explains / this is how / to micromanage an optimal viewing distance from the eye”). Though the title and subject may sound institutional, the narrative veers off into eros, lushness, beauty, and the lack of boundary between the self and the subjects that surround us. Roaming the halls of the museum, Schiff is attuned to the trespasses that attend to power, collecting, and curating, and the abuses and injustices of capitalism. “I could steer one on one’s way toward / something else. The digressions / are endless.” The digressions are, in fact, the pleasures of these long, fractal sentences.

These poems transform the museum into a microcosm of both the high and the low, the symbols of power and the objects borne of affections, the dangers and the delights of human endeavor. The ingenious thinking—the shaping of these artifacts as narrative of both the arc of history and the intimacy of the mind when left to meditate and imagine their uses—is what gives this collection its soul, its urgency. Schiff is a docent enthralled and enthralling, intimate with all that surrounds her and ready to draw you into her world, into her captivating mind.

Robyn Schiff is the author of four collections of poetry. Information Desk: An Epic was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Schiff has received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she coedits Canarium Books—an independent small press dedicated to publishing exceptional books of poetry. She is a professor at the University of Chicago, where she is Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

Four Quartets Finalists

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from the Chinese, English, French, and German. His full-length English translations from Chinese include Song Lin’s The Gleaner Song and Zhu Zhu’s The Wild Great Wall. He has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Alexander von Humboldt Foundations, Headlands, Lyrik Kabinett/Artist-in-Residence Munich, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection The Orange Tree (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.