1953, soon after the school was founded, and taught there until he retired in 1980. As a teacher and critic, Cunningham often concentrated on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, authoring works such as Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy. Cunningham was married three times including to the poet Barbara Gibbs in 1937 (divorced 1945), with whom he had a daughter, Cunningham's only child. He died of heart failure in Marlborough, Massachusetts, in 1985. He was the model for the book Stoner by John Williams. Poetry Cunningham's output was as spare as his style (ofttimes called the Plain Style) and his Christian heritage remained a part of his outlook adding a distinctive thread in his poetry. Cunningham published only a few hundred carefully wrought poems over his relatively long career. Many were just a few lines long; "with tight, little ironic lines", Cunningham was one of three or four masters of the epigram form in the English language. Many of his epigrams included social and moral observations and were incisive, witty, and judicatory. He employed an iambic pulse with firm, lucid, deft, and light pentameter lines. Cunningham's epigrams (including his translations of the Latin poet Martial) and short poems were often witty and sometimes ribald (see, e.g., "It Was in Vegas, Celibate and Able"). "I like the trivial, vulgar and exalted," he closed a verse. Richard Wilbur labeled him our best epigrammatic poet. Cunningham's epigrams have been described as both brilliant and quotable. Cunningham was one of a small number of modern writers to treat the epigram in its full, classical sense: a short, direct poem dealing with subjects from the whole range of personal experience, not necessarily satirical. Cunningham's longer poems "tend toward the epigrammatical, little quotable bits that express thoughts with exceptional neatness." His plain-spoken lyrics about love, sex, loss, and the American West were especially haunting and original (e.g., "Maples in the slant sun/The gay color of decay/Was it unforgivable,/My darling, that you loved me?"). Critics often yoked him to his early influence, Yvor Winters, but his verse actually bears only a formalistic similarity to Winters's work. Cunningham "inclined toward logical statement and syllogistic argument, saying so much in so little space often in single iambic pentameter couplet"."Poetry," wrote Cunningham, "is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition." The poet Thom Gunn, in reviewing The Exclusions of a Rhyme in