The American poet CK Williams has died at the age of 78, the New York Times has reported. The NYT said that Williams first made his mark in the late 1960s with short poems that addressed love and politics. In the 1970s he began experimenting with longer lines. “For a long time I had been writing poetry that leaves everything out,” he told the NYT in 2000. “It’s like a code. You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it. But I then realised that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose.”

He has been described by Paul Muldoon as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation”. Williams’s early work focused on political issues such as Vietnam and social injustice. In his later work, he shifted to a more introspective approach.

He gave the Poetry Society annual lecture in 2011; the subject was “On Being Old”. Williams died on Sunday at his home in Hopewell, New Jersey. The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Catherine Mauger Williams, said.