Kunitz, Stanley 1905–

views updated

Kunitz, Stanley 1905–

(Stanley Jasspon Kunitz)

PERSONAL: Born July 29, 1905, in Worcester, MA; son of Solomon Z. (a manufacturer) and Yetta Helen (Jasspon) Kunitz; married Helen Pearce, 1930 (divorced, 1937); married Eleanor Evans, November 21, 1939 (divorced, 1958); married Elise Asher (an artist), June 21, 1958; children: (second marriage) Gretchen. Education: Harvard University, A.B. (summa cum laude), 1926, A.M., 1927.

ADDRESSES: Home—37 West 12th St., New York, NY 10011-8502.

CAREER: Poet. Wilson Library Bulletin, New York City, editor, 1928–43; Bennington College, Bennington, VT, English faculty, 1946–49; Potsdam State Teachers College (now State University of New York College at Potsdam), Potsdam, NY, professor of English, 1949–50; New School for Social Research (now New School University), New York City, lecturer in English, 1950–57; Poetry Center, Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA), New York City, with poetry workshop, 1958–62; Columbia University, New York City, lecturer, 1963–66, adjunct professor of writing in School of the Arts, 1967–85. Member of staff of writing division, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, 1968–. Fellow, Yale University, 1969–; visiting senior fellow, Council of the Humanities, and Old Dominion Fellow in creative writing, Princeton University, 1978–79. Director of seminar, Potsdam Summer Workshop in Creative Arts, 1949–53; poet-in-residence, University of Washington, 1955–56, Queens College (now Queens College of the City University of New York), 1956–57, Brandeis University, 1958–59, and Princeton University, 1979. Danforth Visiting Lecturer at colleges and universities in the United States, 1961–63; visiting professor, Yale University, 1972, and Rutgers University, 1974. Lectured and gave poetry readings under cultural exchange program in USSR and Poland, 1967, in Senegal and Ghana, 1976, and in Israel and Egypt, 1980. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, consultant on poetry, 1974–76, honorary consultant in American letters, 1976–83. Military service: U.S. Army, Air Transport Command, 1943–45; became staff sergeant.

MEMBER: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (secretary, 1985–88), Academy of American Poets (chancellor, 1970–), Poets House (founding president, 1985–90), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Garrison Medal for poetry, Harvard University, 1926; Oscar Blumenthal Prize, 1941; Guggenheim fellowship, 1945–46; Amy Lowell traveling fellowship, 1953–54; Levinson Prize, Poetry magazine, 1956; Saturday Review award, 1957; Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, University of Chicago, 1958; Ford Foundation grant, 1958–59; National Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1959; Pulitzer Prize, 1959, for Selected Poems, 1928–1958; Brandeis University creative arts award medal, 1964; Academy of American Poets fellowship, 1968; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose Trophy, 1970; American Library Association notable book citation, 1979, for The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978; Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry, 1980; National Endowment for the Arts senior fellowship, 1984; Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Yale University Library, 1987; Walt Whitman Award citation of merit, with designation as State Poet of New York, 1987; Montgomery Fellow, Dartmouth College, 1991; Centennial medal, Harvard University, 1992; National Medal of Arts, 1993; National Book Award, 1995, for Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected; Shelley Memorial Award, 1995; Courage of Conscience Award, 1998; Frost Medal, 1998; Jewish Cultural Achievement Award, 2000; named Poet Laureate of the United States, 2000. Litt.D., Clark University, 1961, Anna Maria College, 1977; L.H.D., Worcester State College, 1980, SUNY-Brockport, 1987, and Emerson College, 2001.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Intellectual Things, Doubleday, Doran (New York, NY), 1930.

Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, Holt (New York, NY), 1944.

Selected Poems, 1928–1958, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1958.

The Testing-Tree: Poems, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1971.

The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems, 1940–70, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1974.

The Coat without a Seam: Sixty Poems, 1930–1972, Gehenna Press (Northampton, MA), 1974.

The Lincoln Relics, Graywolf Press (Townsend, WA), 1978.

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979.

The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1983.

Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1985.

Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

The Collected Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Genine Lentine) The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, Norton (New York, NY), 2005.

NONFICTION

(Translator with Max Hayward) Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

(Translator) Andrei Voznesensky, Story under Full Sail, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1974.

Robert Lowell: Poet of Terribilita, Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, NY), 1974.

A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975.

Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Stanley Moss, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1993.

Also contributor of translations to: Andrei Voznesensky, Antiworlds, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1966; Voznesensky, Antiworlds [and] The Fifth Ace, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1967; and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stolen Apples, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1971.

EDITOR

Living Authors: A Book of Biographies, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1931.

(With Howard Haycraft) Authors Today and Yesterday: A Companion Volume to "Living Authors," H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1933.

(With Howard Haycraft) The Junior Book of Authors: An Introduction to the Lives of Writers and Illustrators for Younger Readers, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1934, second revised edition, 1951.

(With Howard Haycraft) British Authors of the Nineteenth Century, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1936.

(With Howard Haycraft) American Authors, 1600–1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1938, 8th edition, 1971.

(With Howard Haycraft) Twentieth-Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1942, first supplement, 1955.

(With Howard Haycraft) British Authors before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1952.

Poems of John Keats, Crowell (New York, NY), 1964.

(With Vineta Colby) European Authors, 1000–1900: A Biographical Dictionary of European Literature, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1967.

(Editor and author of introduction) Ivan Drach, Orchard Lamps, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1978.

Selections: University and College Poetry Prizes, 1973–78, Academy of American Poets, 1980.

(Author of introduction) The Essential Blake, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor, author of introduction, translator; with Max Hayward) Poems of Akhmatova/Izbrannye stikhi, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1997.

(Editor, with David Ignatow) The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, by Karl Shapiro, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1998.

CONTRIBUTOR

War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Oscar Williams, John Day (New York, NY), 1945.

The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse, edited by W.H. Auden, Criterion, 1956.

How Does a Poem Mean?, edited by John Ciardi, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1959.

John Fischer and Robert B. Silvers, editors, Writing in America, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1960.

Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962.

American Lyric Poems: From Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Elder Olson, Appleton (New York, NY), 1964.

Anthony J. Ostroff, editor, The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964.

Vineta Colby, editor, American Culture in the Sixties, H.W. Wilson (New York, NY), 1964.

The Distinctive Voice, edited by William J. Martz, Scott, Foresman (New York, NY), 1966.

Where Is Vietnam?: American Poets Respond, edited by Walter Lowenfels, Doubleday-Anchor (New York, NY), 1967.

Robert Lowell and others, editors, Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1967.

Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1973.

Fifty Years of American Poetry: Anniversary Volume for the Academy of American Poets, Abrams (New York, NY), 1984.

Contemporary American Poetry, edited by A. Poulin, Jr., Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 4th edition, 1985.

Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic, New Republic, New Yorker, Antaeus, New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, and Harper's. General editor, "Yale Series of Younger Poets," Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1969–77.

SIDELIGHTS: Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Campbell noted that Kunitz's selection as poet laureate—the highest literary honor in America—"affirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet." Atlantic Monthly contributor David Barber likewise cited Kunitz as "not only one of the most widely admired figures in contemporary poetry but also, rarer still, a true ambassador for his art." Barber felt that Kunitz, having "continued to write poems of a startling richness at an advanced age … has arguably saved his best for last…. The venerable doyen of American poetry is still a poet in his prime."

Having published books throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, Kunitz has exerted a subtle but steady influence on such major poets as Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden, and Robert Lowell. Through his teaching he has provided encouragement to hundreds of younger poets as well. His output has been modest but enduring: since 1930, he has published only a dozen volumes of poetry. "I think that explains why I am able to continue as a poet into my late years," Kunitz once explained in Publishers Weekly. "If I hadn't had an urgent impulse, if the poem didn't seem to me terribly important, I never wanted to write it and didn't. And that's persisted." While the complexity of Kunitz's initial works delayed critical attention, in 1959, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his third poetry collection, Selected Poems, 1928–1958. Since then, he has earned a high reputation for "work with a lifetime steeped in it," to quote Barber.

Some critics suggested that Kunitz's poetry has steadily increased in quality in the most recent decades. As Virginia Quarterly Review contributor Jay Parini observed: "The restraints of [Kunitz's] art combine with a fierce dedication to clarity and intellectual grace to assure him of a place among the essential poets of his generation, which includes Roethke, Lowell, Auden, and Eberhart." This place was confirmed in 1995, when Kunitz was honored with the National Book Award for Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, and again in 2000, when he assumed the mantle of poet laureate.

Kunitz's early poetry collections, Intellectual Things and Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, earned him a reputation as an intellectual poet. Reflecting their author's admiration for English metaphysical poets like John Donne and George Herbert, the intricate metaphorical verses in these collections were recognized more for their craft than their substance. Thus, they were somewhat slow to garner widespread critical attention. "In my youth, as might be expected, I had little knowledge of the world to draw on," Kunitz once explained to CA. "But I had fallen in love with language and was excited by ideas, including the idea of being a poet. Early poetry is much more likely to be abstract because of the poverty of experience."

In his assessment of Kunitz's early work, Barber declared that the poems were "dense, fiercely wrought, intricately figured—and for their day rather beyond the pale. They gave the impression of owing more to the metaphysicals than to the moderns and of being nourished on a Yeatsian diet of eroticized mysticism. Formally accomplished, they were nonetheless humming with a cathartic energy that set them apart from the dominant strains of American lyric poetry."

Kunitz followed his Pulitzer Prize-winning Selected Poems, 1928–1958, with The Testing-Tree: Poems, a collection in which the author "ruthlessly prods wounds," according to Stanley Moss in the Nation. "His primordial curse is the suicide of his father before his birth. The poems take us into the sacred woods and houses of his 66 years, illuminate the images that have haunted him…. [Kunitz] searches for secret reality and the meaning of the unknown father. He moves from the known to the unknown to the unknowable—not necessarily in that order." And Robert Lowell commented in the New York Times Book Review: "One reads [The Testing-Tree] from cover to cover with the ease of reading good prose fiction…. I don't know of another in prose or verse that gives in a few pages the impression of a large autobiography." Discussing the self-revelatory nature of his work, Kunitz once told CA: "By its nature poetry is an intimate medium,… Perhaps that's why it is so dangerously seductive to the creative spirit. The transformation of individual experience—the transpersonalization of the persona, if you will—is work that the imagination has to do, its obligatory task. One of the problems with so much of what was called, in the '60s, confessional poetry was that it relied excessively on the exploitation of self, on the shock effect of raw experience. My conviction is that poetry is a legendary, not an anecdotal, art."

Published in 1971, The Testing-Tree was perceived by critics as a significant stylistic departure for its author. Lowell, for example, commented in the New York Times Book Review that the two volumes "are landmarks of the old and the new style. The smoke has blown off. The old Delphic voice has learned to speak 'words that cats and dogs can understand.'" Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Marie Henault concurred: "The Testing-Tree [reveals] a new, freer poetry, looser forms, shorter lines, lowercase line beginnings…. Overall the Kunitz of this book is a 'new' Kunitz, one who has grown and changed in the thirteen years since Selected Poems." Gregory Orr offered this view in American Poetry Review: "There is a stylistic shift, but more deeply than that there is a fundamental shift in Kunitz's relation to the world and to his life."

Asked to comment on this stylistic shift in Publishers Weekly, Kunitz noted that his early poems "were very intricate, dense and formal…. They were written in conventional metrics and had a very strong beat to the line…. In my late poems I've learned to depend on a simplicity that seems almost nonpoetic on the surface, but has reverberations within that keep it intense and alive…. I think that as a young poet I looked for what Keats called 'a fine excess,' but as an old poet I look for spareness and rigor and a world of compassion." If Kunitz's earlier poems were often intricately woven, intellectual, lyricized allegories about the transcendence of physical limitations, his later work can be seen as an emotive acceptance of those limitations.

While Kunitz's style has changed, his themes have not. One of Kunitz's most pervasive themes concerns the simultaneity of life and death. "It's the way things are: death and life inextricably bound to each other," he once explained to CA. "One of my feelings about working the land [as a gardener] is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil." He once revealed in the New York Times: "The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry." Other themes concern "rebirth, the quest, and the night journey (or descent into the underworld)," explained the poet in Poetry.

Kunitz's willingness to explore such serious themes has prompted critics to applaud his courage, and to describe him as a risk taker. Analyzing one of Kunitz's better-known poems, "King of the River," from The Testing-Tree, New York Times Book Review contributor Robert B. Shaw wrote: "Kunitz's willingness to risk bombast, platitude or bathos in his contemplation of what he calls 'mystery' is evident in [this poem]. Mystery—of the self, of time, of change and fate—is not facilely dispelled but approached with imaginative awe in his work; in our rationalistic century this is swimming against the stream. This is a form of artistic heroism; and when Kunitz's scorning of safety meshes firmly with his technical skills, the outcome is poetry of unusual power and depth." Mary Oliver similarly observed in Kenyon Review that "what is revealed, then, is courage. Not the courage of words only, but the intellectual courage that insists on the truth, which is never simple."

Kunitz reveals within his works an optimism that is apparent in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, his celebration of rural life published in 1985. A collection of twelve poems, several prose essays, and an interview from the Paris Review, Next-to-Last-Things reflects the poet's love of nature, acts of conscience, and the loneliness that comes from both age and creativity. New York Times Book Review contributor R.W. Flint observed: "The sharp and seasoned good humor Stanley Kunitz brings to the poems, essays, interviews and aphorisms in Next-to-Last Things is a tonic in our literary life…. Paradox and complication entice him, and he now cheerfully discusses a body of poetry, his own, that he rightly finds to have been 'essentially dark and grieving—elegiac.'"

In Next-to-Last Things, critics found that both Kunitz's perception of the themes of life and death and his style had undergone further transitions. Chicago Tribune Book World contributor James Idema noted that Kunitz's poetry had become yet more austere: "The po-ems that open the book are leaner than those from the early and middle years, narrower on their pages…. Some of them are serene and melancholy, as you might expect. Most reflect the sky-and-weather environment of his Provincetown summer home, where he is most comfortable confronting 'the great simplicities.' But the best ones are full of action and vivid imagery."

Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected encapsulates much of Kunitz's later oeuvre and includes nine new works of poetry. "The Wellfleet Whale," a nature poem that speaks to a finback whale run aground, is accompanied by "Touch Me," wherein the artist characteristically contemplates an earthbound immortality. The collection, which earned its ninety-year-old author the National Book Award for poetry, is considered to possess an assured poetic voice and a heightened vision, sensitive to subtleties and nuances of life filled with meaning. "In youth, poems come to you out of the blue," Kunitz told Mary B.W. Tabor in the New York Times. "They're delivered at your doorstep like the morning news. But at this age," he added, "one has to dig."

Barber felt that, in Passing Through, "one enters the presence of an indomitable elder spirit writing with alertness, tenacity, and finesse, still immersed in the life of the senses and persisting in the search for fugitive essences. Neither resigned nor becalmed, Kunitz's … poems are by turns contemplative, confiding, mythic, and elegiac. If they have the measured and worldly tone that befits an old master, they also have the ardent and questing air of one whose capacity for artless wonder seems inexhaustible."

Although Kunitz's style has changed over his seven decades as a poet, his methods have not. A notebook and a pen render a sketch; many late nights over a manual typewriter result in a finished poem. What he does not find satisfactory, he destroys. "I don't want my bad poems to be published after I'm not around to check them," he told Tabor.

"I don't try to preordain the form of a poem," Kunitz once revealed to CA, discussing his personal experience of the poetic craft. "There's a good deal of automatism in the beginning, as I try to give the poem its head. Most of all I am looking for a distinctive rhythm…. I want the poem to grow out of its own materials, to develop organically." The organic quality of a poem is of primary importance to Kunitz. "I write my poems for the ear," he explained. "In fact, my method of writing a poem is to say it. The pitch and tempo and tonalities of a poem are elements of its organic life. A poem is as much a voice as it is a system of verbal signs. I realize that ultimately the poet departs from the scene, and the poems that he abandons to the printed page must speak for themselves. But I can't help wondering about the influence on posterity of the technical revolution that will enable them to see and hear, on film and tape, the poets of our century. Suppose we had videotapes of Keats reading his ode 'To Autumn' or Blake declaiming 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'!"

Kunitz's 100th birthday on July 29, 2005, was marked by celebrations in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, along with W.W. Norton's publication of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, co-written with Genine Lentine.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz on His Eightieth Birthday, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1986.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 14, 1980.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 48:American Poets, 1880–1945, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Henault, Marie, Stanley Kunitz, Twayne (New York, NY), 1980.

Hungerford, Edward, editor, Poets in Progress, Northwestern University Press (Chicago, IL), 1962, revised edition, 1967.

Kunitz, Stanley, Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1993.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr., Contemporary American Poetry, Random House (New York, NY), 1965.

Orr, Gregory, Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Ostroff, Anthony J., editor, The Contemporary Poet as a Critic and Artist, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1964.

Rodman, Selden, Tongues of Fallen Angels, New Directions (Newton, NJ), 1974.

Rosenthal, M. L., The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1960.

PERIODICALS

American Poetry Review, March/April, 1976; July, 1980; September-October, 1985.

Atlantic Monthly, June, 1996, David Barber, "A Visionary Poet at Ninety."

Boston Review, December 2000–January 2001, p. 53.

Chicago Tribune Book World, December 22, 1985.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 1974.

Harper's, February, 1986.

Houston Chronicle, December 24, 2000.

Iowa Review, spring, 1974.

Kenyon Review, summer, 1986, pp. 113-35.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 24, 2000, p. 3.

Nation, September 20, 1971.

New Yorker, October 16, 1995, p. 50.

New York Quarterly, fall, 1970.

New York Review of Books, November 22, 1979.

New York Times, July 7, 1979; March 11, 1987; August 29, 1993, sec. 9, p. 3; November 30, 1995, p. B1, C18; August 2, 2000, Dinitia Smith, "The Laureate Distilled, to an Eau de Vie," p. B1.

New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1965; March 21, 1971; July 22, 1979; April 6, 1986, p. 11; October 1, 2000, Robert Campbell, "God, Man, and Whale," p. 16.

Paris Review, spring, 1982.

People Weekly, October 30, 2000, p. 159.

Poetry, September, 1980.

Prairie Schooner, summer, 1980.

Publishers Weekly, December 20, 1985; November 20, 1995, pp. 17, 20; July 31, 2000, review of Collected Poems, p. 89.

San Francisco Examiner, October 4, 2000.

Saturday Review, September 27, 1958; December 18, 1971.

Sewanee Review, winter, 1988, pp. 137-49.

Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 1980.

USA Today, October 12, 2000, p. 15A.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1980.

Washington Post, May 12, 1987; July 29, 2000.