Lisel Mueller, Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies at 96

Her themes included language, nature and history, including her own flight from Nazi Germany. Lisel Mueller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose elegant work drew on nature, her experiences as a parent, folklore and history, including her own flight from Nazi Germany as a teenager, died on Feb. 21 in Chicago, where she lived in a retirement community. She was 96.

Her daughter Jenny Mueller, who confirmed the death, said Ms. Mueller had been dealing with the aftereffects of pneumonia. Ms. Mueller won the 1997 Pulitzer for “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” which appeared some three decades after her first collection, “Dependencies,” in 1965.

“Her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world,” the Pulitzer citation read. “It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality —­ ‘the hard, dry smack of death against the glass. ’” The quoted line is from a poem in the collection, “The Power of Music to Disturb. ” Another in that volume, “On Reading an Anthology of Postwar German Poetry,” spoke to how Ms.

Mueller’s childhood — she escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 with her mother and sister — had influenced her life and thinking: America saved meand history played me false:I was not crushedunder rubble, nor was I beatenalong a frozen highway;my children are not deadof postwar hunger;my love is back, with his brainintact; his toes accounted for;I have forced no oneinto the chamber of death. In other poems she drew inspiration from the bucolic life she found in Lake County, Ill. , north of Chicago, where she lived for many years with her husband, Paul Edward Mueller, whom she married in 1943. Poems like “Moon Fishing” and “Sometimes, When the Light” are full of the imagery of nature.

Language, too, was a favorite subject. “In the new language everyone spoke too fast,” she wrote in “Curriculum Vitae,” the autobiographical opening poem in “Alive Together. ” “Eventually I caught up with them. ” She did indeed, as she showed in the wordplay poem “Things,” from the same volume, here in its entirety: What happened is, we grew lonelyliving among the things,so we gave the clock a face,the chair a back,the table four stout legswhich will never suffer fatigue.