Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kunitz, Stanley (Vol. 148) - Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan (essay date 1998)

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Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: “Lost Worlds: Midcentury Revisions of Modernism,” in Containing Multitudes: Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Twayne, 1998, pp. 1–36.

[In the following excerpt, Moramarco and Sullivan discuss the historical context of mid-twentieth-century American poetry and provide an overview of Kunitz's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the development of his poetic style.]

“O world so far away! O my lost world!”

—Theodore Roethke, “Otto”

“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?”

—Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

Major midcentury poets like Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz, born in the first two decades of the twentieth century and at the center stage of poetry by the fifties, inherited the heaviest of burdens. Not only did they work in the...

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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