Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kunitz, Stanley J(asspon) (Vol. 14) - Robert B. Shaw

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ROBERT B. SHAW

Even if change were not so prominent among his themes, the reader of Kunitz's life work [in "The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978"] would have to be aware of changes time has wrought upon his style. From his first book, "Intellectual Things" (1930) through the "Selected Poems" (1958) … Kunitz pursued a style that even for those times was formidably ornate. His rhythms and diction harked back to the Elizabethan sonneteers and the Jacobean dramatists. In the 1960's he altered his style decisively, eschewing grand effects and writing in a language both contemporary and determinedly direct, as if in penitence for having earlier dallied with rhetorical convolutions. (p. 1)

I suspect that [Robert Lowell's "Life Studies" served as a potent example] to Kunitz, for his poems in "The Testing-Tree" (1971) and after, besides being metrically relaxed, are frequently given to autobiography and anecdote with something of Lowell's calculated...

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1. Introduction
2. A.J.M. Smith
3. John Ciardi
4. Frank Kermode
5. Robert B. Shaw
6. Harry Marten
7. Copyright