Award Five Bronze Stars

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1966-1968)

American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award ( [1966])

Air Medal

Sewanee Review poetry fellowship (1954-55)

Vachel Lindsay Prize (1959)

Levinson Prize (1982)

Guggenheim fellowship (1961-62)

National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1966)

New York Quarterly Poetry Day Award (1977)

Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina (1983)

Order of the South

Harriet Monroe Prize (1996)

Georgia Writers Hall of Fame