Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kunitz, Stanley (Vol. 148) - Elizabeth Kastor (essay date 12 May 1987)

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Elizabeth Kastor (essay date 12 May 1987)

SOURCE: “Stanley Kunitz: The Poetic Adversary,” in Washington Post, May 12, 1987, pp. D1, D6.

[In the following essay, Kastor presents an overview of Kunitz's career and accomplishments, and reports Kunitz's comments on his work and the role of the poet.]

Stanley Kunitz has always written deep into the night and through to morning and, when desperate publishers plead for an overdue essay from the 81–year-old poet, as they lately have been, the nights grow even longer. Over the last three, he has slept less than six hours. “The world's quiet then,” says Kunitz. “I feel that splendid isolation, which is fructifying, replenishing.”

And he does somehow manage to look replenished by those nights filled with writing, nights that have, over the last six decades, made him a dean of the poetic scene and won him the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and, this year, the Bollingen Prize. He...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Stanley Kunitz with Cynthia Davis (interview date 1972)
   2. Robert Weisberg (essay date Spring 1975)
   3. Andrew Motion (review date 2 November 1979)
   4. Vernon Young (review date 22 November 1979)
   5. Alan Brownjohn (review date April 1980)
   6. Peter Stitt (review date September 1980)
   7. Cynthia A. Davis (essay date Spring 1981)
   8. Gregory Orr (essay date 1985)
   9. James Idema (review date 22 December 1985)
   10. Thomas D'Evelyn (essay date 6 March 1987)
   11. Elizabeth Kastor (essay date 12 May 1987)
   12. Calvin Bedient (review date Winter 1988)
   13. Stanley Kunitz with Peter Stitt (interview date 1990)
   14. Michael Ryan (essay date 1993)
   15. Susan Mitchell (essay date 1993)
   16. Phoebe Pettingell (review date 9–23 October 1995)
   17. A. V. Christie (review date 31 December 1995)
   18. Stanley Kunitz with Bill Moyers (interview date 1995)
   19. David Yezzi (review date 1996)
   20. Judith Kitchen (review date Summer 1996)
   21. John Taylor (review date February 1997)
   22. Stanley Kunitz with Gary Pacernick (interview date Fall 1997)
   23. Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan (essay date 1998)
   24. Linton Weeks (essay date 29 July 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright