Criticism > Poetry > Kunitz, Stanley (Jasspon) - James Finn Cotter (review date 1980)

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James Finn Cotter (review date 1980)

SOURCE: A review of Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, in The Hudson Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 131–50.

[Cotter reviews Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, briefly remarking on Kunitz's poetic development.]

[In The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Kunitz] arranges his poems in reverse chronological order, but the strategem cannot hide the nature of his poetic development. His early poems launch a direct assault on the Self, using myth ("For Proserpine"), rhetoric ("O Sion of my heart"), and melancholy ("I wept for my youth") as the traditional arsenal for one's siege. No wonder Kunitz decided not to begin his book with such rusty stuff; too bad it had to be included at all. Kunitz began to find his idiom in his second volume, published in 1944, with poems like 'Father and Son," although here too the Self-conscious rears its easy head: "At the water's...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Poetry (review date 1930)
   2. Mark Schorer (review date 1944)
   3. David Wagoner (review date 1958)
   4. Harvey Gross (essay date 1965)
   5. Jean H. Hagstrum (essay date 1967)
   6. Stanley Moss (review date 1971)
   7. Stanley Kunitz with Cynthia Davis (interview date 1972)
   8. Stanley Kunitz with Robert Boyers (interview date 1972)
   9. Robert Weisburg (essay date 1975)
   10. James Finn Cotter (review date 1980)
   11. Gregory Orr (review date 1980)
   12. Stanley Kunitz (essay date 1984)
   13. Stanley Kunitz with Peter Stitt (interview date 1990)
   14. David Barber (review date 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. How to Analyze a Poem
2. Poetry