William Bronk is best known for his austere view of the world as well as writing style. His language—subtle, balanced in tone and diction, essential—is possibly the most distilled in all of twentieth-century American poetry. In addition, Bronk is always explicit visually and resonant musically. His work keeps alive a New England poetic tradition, evoking nature and the seasons, winter most of all, and delving into the nature of reality or truth. These concerns were firmly established early in twentieth-century American poetry by the New England poets Robert FROST and Wallace STEVENS, then later by, along with Bronk, Robert CREELEY and George OPPEN, and in the nineteenth century by Henry David Thoreau (an especially strong influence on Bronk), Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson.

Bronk was born in Fort Edward, near Hudson Falls, New York where he lived his entire life except for his student years at Dartmouth College and Harvard University, a period of military service during World War II and a brief stint as an instructor at Union College. Even after he gained a wide readership, Bronk shrank from public attention and concentrated on his immediate surroundings. His writing expresses his refusal to compromise his life style and point of view as in his poem "The Abnegation" (1971): "I will not / be less than I am to be more human." He believes that what he knows of the world is only a semblance of the truth at best. Reality exists and he is able to intuit its existence, but it is finally beyond his grasp. Despite Bronk’s asceticism, he was constantly sought out by readers and many poets who would journey to Hudson Falls to visit; for young poets, this trip was something of a rite of passage. Bronk won some major poetry awards, the American Book Award in 1982 and the Lannan Prize for his life’s work ten years later. When at Dartmouth, he met Frost, and his fellow