C. K. Williams, whose morally impassioned poems addressing war, poverty and climate change, as well as the imponderable mysteries of the psyche, won him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died on Sunday at his home in Hopewell. N.J. He was 78.

The cause was multiple myeloma, his wife, Catherine Mauger Williams, said.

Mr. Williams first made his mark in the late 1960s with short poems that addressed, in quick, jolting lines, the torments of love and politics. His verse could be, by turns, intensely personal, or public-spirited, taking on the Vietnam War and a long list of social injustices, expressed in hot language. “This is fresh meat right mr nixon?” begins one of his best-known poems, “In the Heart of the Beast,” a response to the fatal shootings of student demonstrators at Kent State University in 1970.

In the mid-1970s he began experimenting with long, unraveled lines that spilled over the boundary of a standard page, allowing for a storytelling style that could be disarmingly casual and colloquial.

“A few nights ago I was half-watching the news on television and half-reading to my daughter,” begins “The Last Deaths,” in his 1977 collection “With Ignorance.” And again, from the poem “Near the Haunted Castle”: “You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe./It’s like a lie, maybe not quite a lie but I don’t want you to worry about it.”