One of the most depressing literary curiosities of the past three decades has been the neglect of Stanley Kunitz's poetry. His earlier books—Intellectual Things (1930) and Passport to the War (1944)—received uniformly high praise from reviewers (for the single exception, see his poem "A Choice of Weapons," but serious critical attention appeared to stop there. Now, at last, the Selected Poems 1928-1958 marks what will surely be the end of Kunitz's quiet Thirty Years' War for a place among the very best poets of our time. Let us hope that the Peace of Westphalia will be celebrated in anthologies and perhaps even on the most important prize lists.

The eighty-five poems in the book exhibit a simultaneously delightful and frightening mind. Its ways are intricate, surprising, and clear; but they occasionally lead so deep or so far forward that the reader performing Pound's "dance along the intellect" discovers himself in a country where he is his own most dangerous enemy, where he is forced to choose sides at the bottom of his own mind. This is, therefore, "difficult" poetry in the true sense: most people do not take kindly to those who make crucial disturbances.

An early poem called "The Words of the Preacher" reads in part:

Taking infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune's old and mediocre mind.

To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame—because
By piecemeal living a man is doomed, I said….

Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
My own future to be;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.

It ought to be enough to say these lines are memorable; but they seem, instead, permanent outside of any mind, like sculpture. What might have been merely heavy rhetoric or bombast from a lesser poet, is here a statement of cause, act, and effect-to-be, bitten into art with unmistakable finality. Poem after poem is of this sort: a model of what language taken to its end should be.

Reviewers of contemporary fiction frequently speak of cerebral and muscular (or gutsy) style, in all the gradations from afflatus to flatulence; the anatomical metaphor in these poems would vary between bone and nerve—the essentials of form and impulse. Kunitz is formal in the dramatic sense, not rigidly, not like a child clinging to a jungle-gym in a whirlwind. Maintaining his balance within a poem, among increasingly intense imagery, movement, and substance, he is able to find the shape of his thought in a manner unknown to the free-association, oh-look-what-I-just-spelled, I'll-tell-you-my-dream poets who appear to think, mistakenly, that even their postcards to each other are interesting.

The following poem, "Among the Gods," should have been a piece of pure arrogance. It isn't.

Within the grated dungeon of the eye
The old gods, shaggy with gray lichen, sit
Like fragments of the antique masonry
Of heaven, a patient thunder in their stare,

Huge blocks of language, all my quarried love,
They justify, and not in random poems,
But shapes of things interior to Time,
Hewn out of chaos when the Pure was plain.

Sister, my bride, who were both cloud and bird
When Zeus came down in a shower of sexual gold,
Listen! we make a world! I hear the sound
Of Matter pouring through eternal forms.

When I try to imagine a poem written on this subject by nearly anyone else, I flinch. But Kunitz justifies his hubris by the extraordinary act of the poem itself: the unanswerable argument. (Yet somewhere in a Beat notebook the attempt undoubtedly lies: "I'm turned on, man, I'm on! I'm strapped to that crazy great hornblowing Gasser of a God, the mainline Screw!" etc. for twenty pages.)

In mood and subject, the poems range widely but perhaps not as widely as some could wish. Kunitz moves from the forceful lyric to the tour de force, but always with clenched fists. Although his ear is delicate, he seldom allows that part of his gift to predominate. This seems to me unfortunate because his obviously flexible technical skill might be put to singing simply, a task it would perform beautifully. I don't think it is presumptuous here to cavil at the missing poem because, if my guess is right, it is one of the reasons for Kunitz's neglect. His work is so charged with passionate ferocity, even when its source is ostensibly lyrical, that it becomes very nearly unbearable if taken in bulk. Put the case: (1) his attacks on the center of his own and the reader's mind are rarely feints, and again and again, the thrusts go home; (2) anthology-making is a notoriously jading profession, and few of today's scissorsmen are noted for their staying power. Ergo … well, one is tempted to see a causal relationship.

Another small complaint: the poems are neither dated nor arranged chronologically. Work covering a very long period of time is mixed into five not entirely useful thematic patterns; and because the books containing the earlier poems are long since out of print, most readers will have no way to trace the growth of the poet. The legendary cry of "New lamps for old" once led to confusion as well as magic.

But these matters lose almost all their importance in the face of the achievement the book represents: imagination functioning repeatedly at the highest pitch. There appear to be no discernible contemporary influences, but there are amazing confluences in which love, art, and death lie fused. I am tempted to quote half the book, but one example of this phenomenon will have to suffice—in a poem about the setting-out of the hero, "The Way Down," which begins:

Time swings her burning hands.
I saw him going down
Into those mythic lands
Bearing his selfhood's gold,
A last heroic speck
Of matter in his mind
That ecstasy could not crack
Nor metaphysics grind.

I saw him going down
Veridical with bane
Where pastes of phosphor shine
To a cabin underground
Where his hermit father lives
Escaping pound by pound
From his breast-buckled gyves;
In his hermit father's coat,
The coat without a seam,
That the race, in its usury, bought
For the agonist to redeem,
By dying in it, one
Degree a day till the whole
Circle's run.

And by the time the reader has finished the remaining two parts of the poem, he can believe it is all happening again. Language and imagery have become uncanny, and the lines are duplicating, in themselves and by themselves, the peril and importance of that life-renewing journey. When this occurs in literature, we should be grateful, as Kunitz himself apparently is, for all of us, in the last lines of a poem that ends the book and speaks of "The spiral verb that weaves / Through the crystal of our lives." He has seen, recognized, suffered, and used

This laurel-sparking rhyme
That we repeat in time
Until the fathers rest
On the inhuman breast
That is both fire and stone,
Mother and mistress, one.