Father and Son (Magill’s Choice: American Ethnic Writers)
At a glance:
- Author: Stanley Kunitz
- First Published: 1944
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Family or family life
The Poem
“Father and Son” is a dramatic lyric in four stanzas, inclining not quite decisively to blank verse. The neutrality of the “and” in the title understates the poem’s tenor, suggesting neither the son’s anxiety in coming to terms with his father nor the inevitable one-sidedness of their relationship. The speaker of the poem need not be understood as Stanley Kunitz; references to time and place are not indubitably autobiographical. The son speaks in a direct, if elliptical, manner. He recounts a journey from the “suburbs,” through the “sleeping country...
[The entire page is 1330 words long]
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