Stanley Kunitz, the elegant centenarian of American poetry, whose musings about life, death, love and memory brought him a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and two terms as U.S. poet laureate, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in New York. He was 100.

Kunitz, whose death was announced by his publisher, W.W. Norton, had been in failing health for some time. He came close to death three years ago and wrote poignantly of the experience in his last book, "The Wild Braid," published in 2005.

Recognition came late to Kunitz, who was 54 and still largely unknown when he won the Pulitzer for his third volume of poetry in 1959. Eventually, critics agreed that he was as much a master of his generation of poets as Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, even though he published far less — a total of 12 volumes.

Kunitz was fascinated by nature's rituals of life, death and renewal and made them themes in his writing, notably in "The Snakes of September" and "End of Summer," two of his most celebrated poems.

One of three children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Kunitz was born in 1905 in Worcester, Mass., in a household stricken with grief. His father, Solomon, killed himself a few weeks before Kunitz's birth by swallowing carbolic acid in a public park.

In 1943, he was drafted as a conscientious objector, a declaration that landed him latrine duty. He later managed to earn a different assignment and spent the rest of his World War II service editing a weekly Army newsmagazine called Ten Minute Break.

After the war, he held a Guggenheim fellowship for a year, then accepted a teaching job at Bennington College in Vermont. Over the next several decades he would teach at other campuses around the country, staying the longest — 1963 to 1985 — at Columbia University.

In 1959, the "poet of the hour" earned the Pulitzer Prize, an award that gave Kunitz the confidence to continue writing.

He served as poet laureate from 1974-1976 and 2000-2001.

Married three times, he is survived by a daughter; a stepdaughter; five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.