Criticism > Poetry > Kunitz, Stanley (Jasspon) - Jean H. Hagstrum (essay date 1967)

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Jean H. Hagstrum (essay date 1967)

SOURCE: "The Poetry of Stanley Kunitz: An Introductory Essay," in Poets in Progress, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 38-58.

[In the following essay, Hagstrum identifies major themes in Kunitz's poetry and traces the development of his technique, examining poems from Intellectual Things, Passport to the War, and Selected Poems, 1928-1958.]

Stanley Kunitz provides his readers with the excitement, rarely encountered in modern poetry, of exploring both the guilty and the joyful recesses of the personality. Of guilt alone, we have perhaps had more than our share, and the pilgrimage from sin to salvation has become—who would have believed it a generation ago?—almost fashionable. But relatively few have moved, as Mr. Kunitz has in his thirty-year poetic career, from darkly morbid psychic interiors to a clean, well-lighted place, where personality is integrated through love and art—love...

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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