Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kunitz, Stanley (Vol. 148) - Peter Stitt (review date September 1980)

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Peter Stitt (review date September 1980)

SOURCE: “The Ineluctable Signature of Stanley Kunitz,” in Poetry, Vol. CXXXVI, No. 6, September, 1980, pp. 347–51.

[In the following review of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Stitt argues that Kunitz's greatest strength lies in his high-minded rhetorical style, rather than the “middle” or “low” style associated with confessional poetry and Kunitz's professed democratic sympathies.]

Although Stanley Kunitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his Selected Poems, he is best known for the revolution in his style which occurred with the poems of The Testing-Tree, published in 1971. Robert Lowell (echoing virtually all the criticism devoted to Kunitz since that time) praised the volume for reflecting what he called “the drift of the age,” a movement away from tortured formality towards prosaic relaxation, away from metaphor and indirection towards...

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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