Pulitzer Prize-winner Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate remembered as a mentor to young writers and a devoted gardener, has died at the age of 100 in New York, his publisher said on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for W.W. Norton, which published his last book "The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden" last year, said Kunitz had died on Sunday of pneumonia. Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said Kunitz would be remembered as both an extraordinary poet of great compassion, and as a mentor who encouraged countless younger poets in their writing.

She recalled a poem called "The Portrait" about his mother slapping him when he came across a picture of his father, who had committed suicide shortly before Kunitz was born. "I swear I can read that over and over and that slap, you can feel it on your own cheek," Swenson told Reuters. "You see that ability to make an experience so vivid and it translates somehow into the same capacity for understanding people's lives," she said. In another poem, "Touch Me," he writes about his wife as he was growing old: "Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, / Remind me who I am."