• 1945 Young Poets prize, Poetry
• 1964 Ford fellowship for drama
• 1970 Henry Bellamann Major award
• 1972 Loines award
• 1972, 1995 National Endowment for the Arts grant
• 1975, 1989 National Endowment for the Humanities grant
• 1978 Gold Medal of Labor (Hungary)
• 1980 New England Poetry Club Golden Rose Award
• 1982 Ingram Merrill Foundation grant
• 1990 California Children's Book and Video Awards recognition for excellence (pre-school and toddlers category), for Ho for a Hat!
• 1991 medal (médaille de vermeil) for service to the French language, French Academy
• 1993 Pro Cultura Hungarica medal
• twice a nominee for the National Book Award in poetry
• 1997 René Vásquez Díaz prize, Swedish Academy

Poetry

• reprint 2002

Poems for children

• reprint 1980
• rev. ed., 1989

Translations

• Poems of a Multimillionaire by Valéry Larbaud (1955)
• reprint 1972
• Two Plays by Charles Bertin : "Christopher Columbus" and "Don Juan" (1970)
• Songs of Childhood, Federico García Lorca (1994).

Non-fiction

Editor

Plays

When the whole history of twentieth-century American poetry is eventually written, it will surely be revealed that despite the apparently larger and often noisier triumphs of "open" forms, astonishingly good verse that we can call "metrical" or "formal" has continued to be written by some of the country's best poets — Smith himself along with his contemporaries and near-contemporaries Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, and Anthony Hecht. That Smith has written poems replete with rhythm, rhyme, wit, and melody — what Louise Bogan called "the pleasures of formal poetry," in an essay by the same name — is cause for celebration, homage, and gratitude.

The far-reaching themes and variety of styles in William Jay Smith's poetry prove that commonplace ideas and everyday activities can be reinvented by lyrical language that enlightens and entertains the reader. His magical "Collected Poems" span a half-century of his life and the life of the nation, adding up to a literary and social history of our times in verse.