Ruth Stone | Acclaimed poet, 96

Ruth Stone, 96, an award-winning poet for whom tragedy halted, then inspired a career that started in middle age and thrived late in life as her sharp insights into love, death, and nature received ever-growing acclaim, died Saturday at her home in Ripton, Vt.

Widowed in her 40s and little known for years after, Ms. Stone became one of the country's most honored poets in her 80s and 90s, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for In the Next Galaxy and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for What Love Comes To.

She received numerous other citations, including a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims and a Whiting Award, which enabled her to have plumbing installed in the farmhouse where she lived for decades in Goshen, Vt.

A native of Roanoke, Va., who spent much of her childhood in Indianapolis, Ms. Stone was a creative and precocious girl for whom poetry was almost literally mother's milk; her mother would recite Tennyson while nursing her. A beloved aunt, Aunt Harriette, worked with young Ruth on poetry and illustrations and was later immortalized, with awe and affection, in the poem "How to Catch Aunt Harriette."

By age 19, Ms. Stone was married and had moved to Urbana, Ill., studying at the University of Illinois. There, she met Walter Stone, a graduate student and poet who became the love of her life.

She divorced her first husband, married Stone, and had two daughters (she also had a daughter from her first marriage). By 1959, he was on the faculty at Vassar College, and both were set to publish books. But on a sabbatical in England, Walter Stone hanged himself, at age 42, a suicide his wife never got over or really understood.

Her first collection, In an Iridescent Time, came out in 1959. But Ms. Stone, depressed and raising three children alone, moving around the country to wherever she could find a teaching job, didn't publish her next book, Topography and Other Poems, until 1971. Another decadelong gap preceded her 1986 release American Milk.

Her life stabilized in 1990 when she became a professor of English and creative writing at the State University of New York in Binghamton. Most of her published work, including American Milk, The Solution and Simplicity, came out after she turned 70.

- AP