Kunitz’s writing).

In the three volumes to 1958, Kunitz writes in measured cadences, frequently adopting the formalism of the Metaphysical poets, for whom he had considerable appreciation and whose poetically formal ranks he had joined. The public had to wait thirteen years for his next collection, The Testing-Tree, which contains twenty-three new poems and seven translations. In this volume, the new Kunitz begins to be evident. Gone is the formality of his first three books of verse. He now uses lines of irregular length—some quite short—and writes in free or blank verse. The tone of his writing is that of one who has, in some curious way, been liberated. The intensity of youth has given way to the mellowness that sometimes comes in middle age.

In this volume, Kunitz appears to have laid to rest some of the ghosts that had haunted him. He suggested as much in the year that The Testing-Tree was published. He was invited to his native Worcester to participate in the Worcester Poetry Festival, returning there, quite apprehensively, for the first time since he had left to live in New York. When he returned from that adventure, he wrote “The Testing-Tree,” the title poem for his forthcoming volume. In doing so, he perhaps came to grips with many of the demons of his past, thereby freeing himself, in terms of both his emotions and his poetic technique, from much that had earlier constrained him artistically.

The Testing-Tree marked a turning point both in the quantity of Kunitz’s output and in his poetic technique. During the following fourteen years, he produced three volumes of new poetry, one volume of essays and poems, and one volume of essays, a remarkable advance for someone whose first three books took twenty-eight years to complete. By the time he published The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, Kunitz had begun to write longer poems. The sixteen new works in this volume are longer than the poems he had previously written, and some, like “The Layers,” which consists of forty-four abbreviated lines, are printed as a single stanza.

A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations

First published: 1975

Type of work: Essays

In these prose pieces, which date as far back as the 1940’s, Kunitz analyzes his world, his poetry, and some of his literary colleagues.

Perhaps feeling the pressure of having reached the biblically allotted three score and ten years of age, Kunitz felt the need to provide some organized record of his reflections about the world in which he lives. In 1975, still active in literary circles, teaching regularly, and fulfilling his duties as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, he compiled this collection of his essays, reviews, and conversations. What might have been an incoherent whole, a ragtag gathering of past writing, in this instance is a coherent and cohesive presentation of the intellectual growth of a gifted, intelligent artist. As in the collections of his poems, where Kunitz imposes a controlling framework often without regard to chronology, so in this selection of his prose work has he paid careful attention to the overall arrangement of what he offers his readers.

It is important to note this detail, because if there is one consistent thread in Kunitz’s artistic life, it is his concern with ordering information. He has shown himself to be keenly aware of the workings of human intelligence, demonstrating in his critical and biographical writings about such poets as William Blake, John Keats, and William Butler Yeats and of such nonliterary geniuses as Albert Einstein that high levels of imagination do not function in linear, sequential ways. A toss of the intellectual dice leaves ideas scattered and inchoate. It is the work of high intellect to gather disparate snips of information and rearrange them into meaningful form. Such is the task of the highest level of writers and scientists. Knowing facts is not enough; imposing a theoretical framework upon them is what makes them resonate.

This collection has been lauded for the elegance of its style, which, in Kunitz’s case, changed quite drastically after 1960, possibly because of his close association with poets Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, two of his closest friends. They helped him understand that the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Metaphysical conventions that had shaped his early poetry could be relaxed. As Kunitz moved toward freer poetic expression in his verse, so did he loosen somewhat the style of his essays.

This volume begins with a consideration of the universe and ends with Kunitz’s concerns about art, moving sequentially from the physical to the aesthetic and linking the two immutably. He writes, as in “Sister Arts,” about the close connection of all the arts, showing the correlations that exist between painters and wordsmiths.

His appreciative prose portraits of Mark Rothko, Roethke, and Lowell contain shrewd aesthetic judgments, well documented and untinged by personal loyalty. His interview with Lowell remains a major source on that poet. In “The Vice-President of Insurance,” a critique of Wallace Stevens’s letters, and in his essay on John Berryman, Kunitz reveals another side of his critical disposition, firing sharp but wholly decorous salvos at both poets.

“Father and Son”

First published: 1944 (collected in Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, 1944)

Type of work: Poem

This largely autobiographical poem is about the dreamlike—sometimes surreal—pursuit of a boy in quest of his dead father.

Perhaps all imaginative writing is autobiographical. The more closely such writings details conform to verifiable facts in the author’s life, the easier it is for readers to see an equivalence between reality and art. Yet such a view contains a hazard to readers of fiction based largely on fact: Writers are at liberty to veer at will from fact to fancy, and when they do, readers may be deceived.

“Father and Son” is Kunitz’s best-known and most-anthologized poem. Written as World War II was erupting in Europe, it is the story, which Kunitz says came to him in a dream, about a boy seeking his dead father. Because the poet’s father committed suicide before his son’s birth, this is not a conventional father-son poem packed with memories of family outings, fishing trips, or ball games.

Kunitz had to invent his father. Anything he devised was reasonable; the boy had no real knowledge of the specter that had sired him. His mother, a distraught widow who, in the aftermath of her shocking loss, had to struggle to run her husband’s manufacturing business and to support her three children, erased the memory of the dead Solomon Z. Kunitz from her household. She could not deny his death, but she could handily deny his having ever existed.

Stanley’s sole concrete memory of his father was of a face in a faded photograph, which was torn from his hand by his angry mother who punished him for treading on forbidden ground in his attempt to construct a past for the father he never knew. “Father and son” festered for three decades in Kunitz’s subconscious before his eerie dream gave him the stuff of his poem.

“Father and Son” has been variously interpreted. It is a thirty-four-line poem, mostly in iambic pentameter, that blurs time and evokes the misty quality surrounding a pond “down the sandy road/ whiter than bone-dust” past the “curdle of fields, where the plums/ Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.”

A boy pursues an apparition down that bone-dust road in the first two narrative stanzas, offering it information about where and how he lives. In the third stanza, he implores the father to return, bargaining with him and promising to wipe the mud stains from his clothes. He begs his father to teach him “how to work and keep me kind.” The apparition, however, disappoints. It does not—cannot—respond. The boy wants to be “a child to those who mourn/ And brother to the foundlings of the field”; he wants to be a “friend of innocence.” His wishes, however, are dashed by the dead father, who can offer only “the white ignorant hollow of his face.”

The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978

First published: 1979

Type of work: Poetry

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Kunitz’s career as a poet, this book contains sixteen new poems and dozens more that had been published previously.

This volume represents the most complete collection of Kunitz’s poems to the year 1978. Although only sixteen of the poems are new, this body represents a departure for Kunitz in that some of the new poems are much longer than any of his earlier ones. The last piece in the collection, “The Layers,” is a highly reflective poem that, more than any of his earlier verse, seems in tone to be the poet’s final message to the world. Like “Father and Son,” “The Layers” has about it a dreamlike quality. Unlike many of his other poems, it consists of a single long (forty-four-line) stanza. The author foresees his death, which may overtake him before he is finished with his work.

Recipient of the Lenore Marshall Prize for the best American poetry book of the year, this volume presents new poems that are forthright and unadorned in their language. They make their impact through terse lines and sharp images. In his later poems, Kunitz seems consciously to strive for psychological impact more than he did in his earlier work. He is quite like a painter who has moved from watercolors to acrylics and revels in the freedom the change allows.

“After the Last Dynasty”

First published: 1958 (collected in The Testing-Tree: Poems, 1971)

Type of work: Poem

This love poem is one of Kunitz’s most subtle and enigmatic works.

Kunitz’s early reference in “After the Last Dynasty” to Chinese poet Li Po (701-762 c.e.), from the T’ang Dynasty, brings to mind his poetry. Li Po, from China’s Szechuan province, was known for the delicacy of his verse and for both his frequent references to flower petals and his water imagery.

Kunitz’s work is a love poem but an ironic one. It was written just as his marriage to Eleanor Evans, his second wife and the mother of his daughter, Gretchen, was crumbling. The poem, like “River Road” from the same period, breaks from the iambic lines so prevalent in American poetry, almost in defiance of past poetic conventions. Just as he is striking out into a new life, so is he launching his poetry on a different course with crisp, almost abrupt lines of free verse.

“After the Last Dynasty” is a deeply felt poem about abandonment. Kunitz compares loving the object of his poem to Chinese guerrilla warfare. She, with a “small bad heart,” failed the man who loved her, fighting him not with strength and health but with her weakness and sickness. He ponders whether she is still “mistress of the valley.” The term “mistress” recurs frequently in his poems.

Kunitz is at once impudent and sentimental in this poem. He is also guardedly humorous. In the final stanza, however, he is tender, saying that he wants to pin a new note on the door of the loved one, a message from which the sloganeering of Chairman Mao is absent. The Chairman Mao part of the poem and the “red crayon language” are subtle devices for constructing the atmosphere that makes the shift of tone in the final stanza particularly effective.

“The Snakes of September”

First published: 1984 (collected in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, 1985)

Type of work: Poem

This poem functions on several levels—it can be read quite literally and, as such, is a well-made poem that communicates directly and effectively.

Stanley Kunitz has long been an inveterate gardener. His two-thousand-square-foot plot in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is tiered, every inch filled with a hodgepodge of interesting plants that coexist happily. Kunitz’s habit became to work on his garden for at least an hour or two every day in summer. It is not surprising, then, that he produced a body of poems about gardens and nature.

In “The Snakes of September,” Kunitz writes about the snakes active in the heat of summer. He is aware of their presence, but they evade capture—not that he wishes to capture them. They hide in bushes and shrubbery, playing their own games with the gardener. The words that Kunitz uses in talking about them are active verbs: “rustling,” “outracing,” “flashed,” “pulsing.” As the poem proceeds toward September, however, when the nights are cooler, the snakes, cold-blooded, lose much of their mobility. A change is announced by Kunitz’s use of the word “torpor.” The two snakes appear through a narrow slit and are seen dangling heads down and intertwined.

The gardener now comes upon them and touches them gently, at which point “At my touch the wild/ braid of creation/ trembles.” The last lines of the poem legitimately invite deeper, post-Edenic interpretations, and the final word, “trembles,” hints at the very source of creation.

“The Wellfleet Whale”

First published: 1981 (collected in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, 1985)

Type of work: Poem

Few poems in the twentieth century have the elegance and stylistic craftsmanship that Kunitz achieved in this work.

“The Wellfleet Whale” grew out of the beaching of a whale on the Massachusetts coast near where Kunitz had a home. A journal entry that Kunitz made at the time of the incident precedes the poem. In this entry, the poet reveals his connection with the whale, the emotional tie that seems to bind the two. Kunitz put his hands on the whale’s flanks and “could feel the life inside him.” The whale opened its eye and, staring directly at Kunitz, sent a shudder of recognition between the two. Then the beached creature died, closing forever the eye that was to haunt Kunitz long afterward.

The poem is divided into five sections. The earliest of them concentrates on sounds, on the “eerie medley of clicks/ and hoots and trills.” The sounds are varied, some like “furniture being smashed/ or the creaking of a mossy door.” Yet all the sounds “melt into a liquid/ song with endless variations.” Kunitz then turns to the loneliness of the vast sea, the sea that the dying whale will never experience again. He uses words such as “disembodied” and “mournful” to recaputre the atmosphere of the scene as he relives it.

Whereas the poem’s first section is largely auditory, the second section is highly visual, but it still retains some of its auditory emphasis in phrases such as “the whisper of the tide.” Kunitz describes the harbor into which the hapless whale ventures, to certain death. Its dorsal fin clips “the diamonded surface,” of the harbor’s water. Kunitz’s use of specific language, employing such terms as “dorsal” and “diamonded surface,” builds the authenticity that characterizes this poem. The lazy drift of seagulls overhead contrasts with the whale’s struggle, and these seagulls reappear toward the end of the poem when they close in to peck at the moribund body of the whale, not yet dead but totally helpless.

Perhaps the most admirable lines of the poem come at the very end as an apostrophe. Speaking to the whale, the poet, in words reminiscent of the Beowulf poet, calls the whale “Master of the whale-roads” and then calls upon the gulls to spread their wings as cover. The whale has suffered having a tourist carve his initials on its hide and others cutting strips of flesh from its dying body. The whale, “disgraced and mortal,” is no more.