Criticism > Poetry > Kunitz, Stanley (Jasspon) - Mark Schorer (review date 1944)

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Mark Schorer (review date 1944)

SOURCE: A review of Passport to the War, in The New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1944, p. 26.

[In the following review of Passport to the War, Schorer comments that Kunitz's "'metaphysical' style" has become less imitative since the publication of his first volume of poetry.]

[Stanley Kunitz] made a … cautious selection of influences and, from the beginning, showed himself to be a first-rate rather than a second-rate poet by integrating those influences with his own vision of experience to produce what may be called a style. Half of his present book. [Passport to the War] consists of selections from his first book, Intellectual Things published in 1930, and comparison is gratifying. For it shows clearly, in the first place, that many of his early poems were exactly as good as they were men taken to be; poems like "Organic Bloom" and "In a Strange House" have lost none of...

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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