Last Thursday, Franz Wright died in his Waltham, Massachusetts home after a long bout with lung cancer, a representative of Wright’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, reported. Wright was 62.

Wright’s scale of experience ranged from the “homicidal to the ecstatic,” wrote critic Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books. “[His] best forms of originality [are] deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence,” she continued.

Wright, like his father, James Wright, is a Pulitzer Prize winner. He received the award in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). “I’ll be damned,” James wrote to him several years before, responding to a poem Franz had mailed to him. “You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”

The younger Wright was born in Vienna, where his father was studying on a Fulbright scholarship, and spent most of his childhood in San Francisco. He wrote his first book, Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (Triskelion Press, 1976), as an undergraduate at Oberlin College.

“He was absolutely devoted to the art of poetry,” his former teacher David Young, a professor emeritus and editor at Oberlin College Press, said, according to The Boston Globe. “It was everything to him and the results, I think, speak for themselves.”

Nevertheless, Wright often found himself under distress, contending with alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental health issues.

“I didn’t fit in the academic world,” he said to The Boston Globe in 2004. “I was drinking; I didn’t know what I was going to do. I got in my car and drove to New York and lived there for a while. I don’t know how I survived—I did some things that were not legal. I lived with friends, or in the streets.”

Wright was nonetheless supported by fellowships at the University of Virginia and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, a teaching position at Emerson College, and several prestigious prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, a PEN/Voelcker Award, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He also translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and René Char, and co-translated, with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, Factory of Tears by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort.

“[Poetry] was all I had, the only thing I felt good at and could take pride in,” he added. “I felt like a complete failure, but not as a poet.”

Wright’s survivors include his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright; his mother, Liberty Kovacs; his brother, Marshall John Wright; and his half brother, André Michael Kovacs.