Gerald Stern, who drew on Nature, history and his own experiences to write prizewinning poetry laced with wistfulness, anger and humor died on Oct. 28 in the Bronx. He was 97.

Mr. Stern, whose “This Time: New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998, came to poetic prominence relatively late; his first published poem , “The Pineys,” appeared in The Journal of the Rutgers University Library in 1969, when he was 44. His first collection “Rejoicings,” was published in 1973, when he was nearing 50.

His second collection, “Lucky Life,” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the year’s best poetry book, and was described when published in 1977 as “a cornerstone in American poetry” by Tayve Neese in the Web Del Sol Review of Books.

Over the years, he would teach at a number of institutions, including Pitt, Columbia, New York and Princeton universities and Sarah Lawrence College. Mr. Stern retired from teaching in the mid-1990s. In 2010, he received the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, his “Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992” received the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. Mr. Stern’s most recent poetry collection, “Blessed As We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018, was published in 2020.