SOURCE: A review of Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, in American Poetry Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, July/August, 1980, pp. 36–41.

If Stanley Kunitz is a major poet, then he must have a major theme. What is that theme? Something that for the moment I'll call "the son's quest for the father." As all authentic major themes of this century must, it represents a fusion of personal crisis with an impersonal, universal significance. For the process of fusing personal and impersonal, the phrase Kunitz uses in relation to his own work is "to convert life into legend." I would assert that there must be a certain balance between the personal and impersonal in such an endeavor. In terms of the father-quest theme, Kunitz's early work (Selected Poems) is weighted toward the impersonal, and it is only in The Testing Tree that the poems approach the unadorned personal source. With the extra-ordinary simplicity and understatement that is his genius in the later work, he tells us the most essential tale of his life and his work:

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born …
("The Portrait")

Let us not underestimate how difficult such simplicity of statement is, nor how great a struggle Kunitz must go through before he can achieve such a straightforward telling of what he elsewhere calls "the curious legend of my youth" ("Open the Gates").

Now that I've spoken of the personal source, the private source; now that I've applied such a grand label as "the son's quest for the father"—what is it that this theme might mean to a reader who does not share the personal crisis that gave rise to it? Kunitz's quest for the father is no less than a quest for the source of his being, a quest for his identity. In a world where forces conspire constantly to destroy our individual sense of identity, a poet's struggle to discover (or create) and affirm his identity is a representative human struggle. If he is triumphant in his quest to affirm his own being in a confrontation with loss and death, then our sense of self is enhanced.

People seek the biological and psychological source of their being in order to understand who they are. But in Kunitz's case, this quest for the biological and psychological source must confront at the very beginning of life the ultimate contradiction of human meaning: death, and self-willed death at that. This quest for the father is by definition—at least in terms of the physical world—doomed to utter failure. So it is removed to the level of the imagination (or legend) because the impossibility of the task does not affect the necessity of the quest. One must have meaning. In Kunitz's case, the quest for the meaning of his personal existence, his being, is intimately, biologically tied up with non-being. And this non-being is mysterious because it is surrounded by silence, because (on the literal level) who can say why someone commits suicide?

The theme of the Quest for the Father takes numerous forms in the body of Kunitz's work. We might start by saying that it is there at the beginning, in the earliest poem Kunitz includes [in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978], "Vita Nuova." And it is there at the end, explicitly in the next-most-recent poem, "What of the Night?," and implicitly in the most recent, "The Knot." One can say, in terms that Kunitz himself might employ, that the theme of the son and the father is the alpha and omega of Kunitz's poetic vision.

In his first appearance, the father is simply part of a quest that we, as readers, participate in, but whose source and motive we don't understand. The speaker in "Vita Nuova" announces that a certain level of personal spiritual accomplishment will be achieved when he "wears his father's face":

Now I will peel that vision from my brain
Of numbers wrangling in a common place,
And I will go, unburdened, on the quiet lane
Of my eternal kind, till shadowless
With inner light I wear my father's face.
("Vita Nuova")

Why this should be the culmination of a quest for identity we do not know, though it works well in the imagistic context. What the speaker seeks is a single self among the multiple selves (this single self to "wear the father's face"); perhaps this self is a growing outward of the "gentler self" within his external physical self (this is not necessarily clear). The other touchstone of all Kunitz's work that is present in "Vita Nuova" is intensity: the final word of the poem, its final aspiration is "intense":

My dark will make, reflecting from your stones,
The single beam of all my life intense.

Intensity will be the standard by which Kunitz measures all language and all statement in his poetry.

The title itself, from Dante's Vita Nuova points to the physical death of a loved one as the moment of spiritual rebirth (or birth to the spiritual) of the survivor. Dante's poem is at the source of all poems of human loss which look forward (spiritual allegory) rather than backward (elegy)….

Although the son's quest for the father manifests itself at crucial moments in numerous earlier poems, the theme is best explored in two individual poems where it dominates the entire dramatic situation: "Father and Son" and "Open the Gates."

     "Father and Son"

Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whiter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.
Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,
After the secret master of my blood,
Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love
Kept me in chains. Strode years, stretched into bird;
Raced through the sleeping country where I was young,
The silence unrolling before me as I came,
The night nailed like an orange to my brow.

How shall I tell him my fable and the fears,
How bridge the chasm in a casual tone,
Saying, "The house, the stucco one you built,
We lost. Sister married and went from home,
And nothing comes back, it's strange, from where she goes.
I lived on a hill that had too many rooms:
Light we could make, but not enough of warmth,
And when the light failed, I climbed under the hill.
The papers are delivered every day;
I am alone and never shed a tear."

At the water's edge, where the smothering ferns lifted
Their arms, "Father!" I cried, "Return! You know
The way. I'll wipe the mudstains from your clothes;
No trace, I promise, will remain. Instruct
Your son, whirling between two wars,
In the Gemara of your gentleness,
For I would be a child to those who mourn
And brother to the foundlings of the field
And friend of innocence and all bright eyes.
O teach me how to work and keep me kind."
Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me
The white ignorant hollow of his face.

It is a most direct telling of the quest: a poem of seeking and beseeching. The father is called "the secret master of my blood." This is Kunitz's primary situation: the incredible urgency of the speaker and the impossibility of what he seeks. First, the pursuit (stanza 1); then the son's account of his life, "my fable and my fears" (stanza 2). What the father made ("the house, the stucco one …") has been lost. A bad omen for the son (who was also "made" by the father) that is shown to be an accurate prediction two lines later with another house ("I lived on a hill …"). There is a failure here for the son ("light we could make, but not enough of warmth …")—a failure of feeling, an inadequacy of feeling. In stanza 3 the son's motive for the pursuit emerges: he believes that the father "knows the way," that he can instruct his son as fathers ordinarily do, are expected to do. The terms of aspiration that the speaker expresses (child, brother, then friend) recapitulate human growth from infancy to family link to adulthood: all that has been lost because of the absence of the father and his instructions. It is when this situation of beseeching has reached its peak of poignancy that the horrible, sudden resolution of the final two lines occurs. The father's face is "ignorant" (the knowledge cannot come from this source), "hollow" (the decay of death is real): both facts are revealed in the final physical gesture of the father's turning back at the last moment before he disappears under the surface of the pond. It is a moment of ghastly revelation, perhaps ironically heightened by the presence of "turtles" and "lilies"—both with Biblical overtones germane to the poem.

     "Open the Gates"

Within the city of the burning cloud,
Dragging my life behind me in a sack,
Naked I prowl, scourged by the black
Temptation of the blood grown proud.

Here at the monumental door,
Carved with the curious legend of my youth,
I brandish the great bone of my death,
Beat once therewith and beat no more.

The hinges groan: a rush of forms
Shivers my name, wrenched out of me.
I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see
The end and the beginning in each other's arms.

Again we have that incantatory energy that animates Kunitz's best work. "Father and Son" is a rather straightforward telling of his tale (minus one crucial detail: the suicide) in which he expresses his personal anguish and his imaginative link of that anguish to his father's absence. "Open the Gates" is that 'quest' tale told at a mythic, Blakean level, with almost no personal contamination. (I say "almost": I think the meaning of the line "curious legend of my youth "is only fully revealed by the later poem, "The Portrait"). "Open the Gates" is a poem of archetypal vision and yet the whole thing is anchored by, suffused with and emanating a strange sexual energy. The final two lines represent a fusion of Apocalypse (the opening of St. John's Revelations: Alpha and Omega) and Freud's Primal Scene. Kuntiz somehow witnesses, even participates in his own engendering.

I've said that I believe the major theme in Kunitz's work is the quest of the foundations of one's being. Because of the "curious legend" of Kunitz's youth, when Kunitz turns to the biological source (which is also the spiritual/metaphysical source) he confronts a mysterious absence that becomes a haunting, obsessive presence.

Sometimes this seeking leads to spiritual fathers who might also guide and instruct Kunitz. For example, Dante in "The Illumination" and Lincoln in "The Lincoln Relics."

At other times, the father's ghost or some analogue is the active seeker, and the speaker (Kunitz) is either passive or pursued. I would call this version of the story "the mysterious summons." We find an example in the early poem "Revolving Meditation":

But why do I wake at the sound,
In the middle of the night,
Of the tread of the Masked Man
Heavy on the stairs,
And from the street below
The lamentation of the wounded glove?

Or these lines from the next-most recent poem, "What of the Night?," lines that are also linked to the father:

What wakes me now
like the country doctor
startled in his sleep?
Why does my racing heart
shuffle down the hall
for the hundredth time
to answer the night bell?
Whoever summons me has need of me …

In yet another version of the story, Kunitz's father appears as an apparition:

Bolt upright in my bed that night
I saw my father flying;
the wind was walking on my neck,
the windowpanes were crying.
("Three Floors")

This child's vision of his father flying about in his bedroom is so similar to the apparition of Lincoln that Kunitz describes in "The Lincoln Relics" that it further confirms the link in Kunitz's imagination between his father and Lincoln:

In the Great Hall of the Library,
as in a glass aquarium,
Abe Lincoln is swimming around,
dressed to the nines
in his stovepipe hat
and swallowtail coat …

A third and far more mythic form that the father takes in Kunitz's work is that of a tree in the "ancestral wood." Here the father is more likely to be grand, a kind of fusion of stag, oak, and vegetation deity as in section 3 of "The Way Down":

O father in the wood,
Mad father of us all,
King of our antlered wills,
Our candelabrum-pride
That the pretender kills,
Receive your dazzling child …

In the marvelous poem "The Testing Tree," the father is both the tree the son confronts and a spirit whose blessing the son seeks for his ordeal:

Here we are in the imaginative territory of The Golden Bough with its rituals of struggle and renewal in the woods. This shows another imaginative level at which Kunitz's quest for the father can be apprehended. Related to the identification of the father with trees and vegetation deities is his association in Kunitz's imagination with ponds. The ultimate confrontation between father and son in "Father and Son" takes place as the father or his ghost is entering a pond. In "Goose Pond," a "white-lipped boy" is born up from the pond and, as he climbs out on the bank, meets "his childhood beating back / To find what furies made him man." In the late poem "Quinnapoxet," Kunitz is fishing in an abandoned reservoir when he has a vision of his father and mother approaching him. In "The Testing Tree," a recurring dream has Kunitz look down a well at an albino walrus who has his father's gentle eyes. It's not necessary for us to understand why the father is associated with these different figures, situations, and natural phenomena; the important thing is to recognize that the theme of the father and the son's quest can take numerous forms.

In identifying the father's presence in various forms in various kinds of poems, I do not mean to be reductive. For one thing, Kunitz's father exists at the very start on the level of legend. Kunitz has no father in the sense that most people do, and so the word "father" which most people use concretely is for Kunitz and Kunitz's work already a symbolic reality.

     "The Portrait"

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

At first it might seem that we do not need to know the information contained in "The Portrait" in order to appreciate what Kunitz is about. And yet, we do. What is more, Kunitz needs to know this information, needs to introduce it into the body of his work. This is the pivotal poem in his whole work, the poem which makes possible the greatness of the later poems. When I say Kunitz needs to know, I mean that the poem acknowledges and integrates certain important pieces of information about his life, certain pieces until now missing from the puzzle. Without these pieces, Kunitz cannot hope to achieve his ambition of "converting life into legend." Now the essential elements of the "life" are present and a true growth can occur that is as rare and powerful as that of later Yeats.

Not only do we learn for the first time that Kunitz's father was a suicide, but also that it was before Kunitz's birth, and perhaps most significantly, that Kunitz's mother "never forgave." For almost the first time, the mother appears and her role becomes clear. As long as Kunitz confined the dynamic of his imaginative life to Father-Son, it seemed impossible to go beyond simple seeking and confronting ("Father and Son"). But when he introduces the mother and her role, suddenly the possible dynamics are greatly extended. Soon other figures enter the poems: Frieda, Kunitz's daughter, his wife, the woman of "After the Last Dynasty," and others. All this is made directly possible by the mother's entrance.

For the first time it is not simply the father's death and mysterious absence which are seen to exert power over the whole of Kunitz's life. The mother's role in the persistence of suffering is revealed: it is her slap on his cheek that still burns fifty years or more later. The persistence of trauma is central to Kunitz's work: the struggle to be healed that takes a whole lifetime of imagination. This poem reveals that it is not simply the father's absence, but also the mother's rage that combine to trap the boy/adult Kunitz. Even later in Kunitz's work, the mother's slap ("my cheek/still burning.") becomes the "gashed thumb" of the poem "Quinnapoxet." In "Quinnapoxet," Kunitz receives a wound from a fish in the "abandoned reservoir"; this wound he shares with his father whose apparition approaches him "with his face averted / as if to hide a scald." It is the father's scald (the suicide wound) and Kunitz's hurt thumb that represent a link between father and son. Kunitz signals to his father:

I touched my forehead
with my swollen thumb
and splayed my fingers out—
in deaf-mute country
the sign for father.

Even the form of Kunitz's wound, a "swollen thumb," has to do with a male, phallic life-force, a life-force "hurt" into being, yet potent. Through this shared wound (scald and gashed thumb) Kunitz does indeed fulfill in a strange way the prophecy of inheritance of that earliest poem, "Vita Nuova"; he does indeed "wear his father's face" (as he also did in the "burning cheek" of "The Portrait")….

"The Lincoln Relics" is one of the ultimate poems of Kunitz's father-son theme. Here that personal theme fuses with the less personal theme of the individual and the state. (I'd say Kunitz's three enduring themes are: fatherson, love, and the individual and the state). Again the challenge is to affirm being in the face of non-being. Death, violence, and negation must be overcome by some authentic act of imagination and affirmation fused together. In section 1, Kunitz rejects the miracles associated with saints' relics and yet affirms the human spirit that Lincoln represents for him:

Cold-eyed, in Naples once,
while the congregation swooned,
I watched the liquefaction
of a vial of precious blood,
and wondered only
how the trick was done.
Saint's bones are only bones
to me, but here,
where the stage is set
without a trace of gore,
these relics on display—
watchfob and ivory pocket knife,
a handkerchief of Irish linen,
a button severed from his sleeve—
make a noble, dissolving music
out of homely fife and drum,
and that's miraculous.

The paradox that the Lincoln relics are homely and yet noble is what Kunitz chooses to affirm as "miraculous." We are in the territory of a spirit-father here: a legendary father, grand, mysterious, and martyred. I am not in any way trying to say Lincoln is merely a substitute for his father. What I mean is that Kunitz's past gives him a peculiar sensitivity to this situation of father figures who are heroic yet doomed, and who are genuinely worthy of our love. Kunitz has access to this theme because of his own "curious legend" and because of the way his imagination has transformed that legend. Again, Kunitz is an extraordinary human spirit in that he encounters at the start of his life a devastating negation and he overcomes (transforms or transfigures) that negation through a major and constantly renewed act of affirmative imagination.

Space doesn't permit me to examine this wonderful poem at length, but only to say that once again (as with so many of the later poems), there is a steady deepening of the father-son theme; it is for Kunitz an inexhaustible mine always capable of yielding new insights, new discoveries about the human spirit, if only he has the courage to dig deeper and deeper into it. As he says near the end of "The Testing Tree":

I want to make only a minor observation about the conclusion of "The Lincoln Relics." Kunitz's own youth and old age are themes here; the quiet imminence of his own life's end as well as the awareness that Lincoln is "slipping away from us / into his legend and his fame." From this double desolation Kunitz's imagination spontaneously generates a new affirmation of the life spirit: the final section of the poem hints briefly at the possibility of Lincoln's reincarnation in a young man glimpsed in a crowd. In this way, the poem is a further stepping toward the future, a direction that we first encountered strongly in "Journal for my Daughter."

     "The Layers"

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkèst night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

At this point we are facing Kunitz's art stripped down to its essentials, and yet the poem contains everything his art is about. Here are the key situations and words all fused into one whole drama: "struggle," "being," the intensity of the spiritual allegory, "affections," affirmation out of deepest desolation, "transformation." All this and age as well. The final test of a poetry of this sort might be its ability to affirm in the face of personal death. We have moved even beyond that other great poem of age, "King of the River," whose final triumph was a series of intense paradoxes:

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.

In "The Layers," Kunitz moves past paradox into pure, strange statement: exultant, quiet, confident: "I am not done with my changes…."

Kunitz's imagination has one purpose: to affirm being over nonbeing. But it is always a struggle. To read Kunitz rightly we must accept that there is a hurt, a negation, at the beginning of Kunitz's life that resonates and persists through the whole life and that affects all the important aspects of his life. This negation is not only the primary negation of death (his father's suicide and the early death of a beloved stepfather telescoped together), but the secondary negation of the mother's unwillingness or inability to "forgive."

Kunitz's primary experience is loss or absence. This fixes a deeply sombre color to his experience of a primary reality: change. If change is real, it can be a negative change (death, nonbeing: the ignorant hollow) or positive, affirmative change (metamorphosis, transformation, other "triumphs" of imagination that fuse with being and the life-force). The stakes are high. When poets in our time have struggled with nonbeing, it has often ended badly: Berryman's suicide, Sylvia Plath and Hart Crane; Roethke's and Lowell's periodic bouts of madness. These poets express that confrontation with nonbeing which is a primary human encounter; we need to hear as much about it as possible, because we share it….

Metamorphosis, desire, memory, vision, love, transformation, myths of quest, dream, will, revelation—it's as though each of the later poems puts forward another profound strategy of affirmation, another new way to endorse and participate in the life force and overcome the ever-present negation. It is not "himself that he remakes in each of the later poems, it is the human spirit that he rebuilds from its foundations. He discovers, in "gathering strengths to proceed on his journey" ("The Layers"), what resources the human spirit has at its disposal to affirm against the realities of negation and despair. It is not simply imagination that affirms. This ceaseless crisis of the spirit demands an affirmation of the whole being that requires great courage and dignity. Kunitz's work is deeply grounded in the tragic sense: an intense, simultaneous awareness of man's dignity and his weakness:

What we discover as we open ourselves more and more to Kunitz's work is that poetry can deal with the deepest issues of the individual human life. It is that triumphant endeavor we once hoped and believed it was. There is something of utmost human importance going on here. This is the poetry of the human spirit: matters of life and death and language; the spirit and the world fuse into one vision that affirms without falsifying.