A review of Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978
[In The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Kunitz] arranges his poems in reverse chronological order, but the strategem cannot hide the nature of his poetic development. His early poems launch a direct assault on the Self, using myth ("For Proserpine"), rhetoric ("O Sion of my heart"), and melancholy ("I wept for my youth") as the traditional arsenal for one's siege. No wonder Kunitz decided not to begin his book with such rusty stuff; too bad it had to be included at all. Kunitz began to find his idiom in his second volume, published in 1944, with poems like 'Father and Son," although here too the Self-conscious rears its easy head: "At the water's edge, where the smothering ferns lifted / Their arms, 'Father!' I cried, 'Return!'" The exclamation may work, but the metaphor does not. In his 1958 Selected Poems, flashes of humor and humanity enliven "The Thief," "The War Against the Trees," and "Rover." Where early Kunitz sounded like late Yeats, the poet discovered his own story and image in the autobiographical "A Testing-Tree," a poem that merits a place in any anthology of modern verse. A late bloomer, Kunitz has fashioned some of his finest poems in the last decade. Ego and Self join hands in "What of the Night?," "Quinnapoxet," "The Lincoln Relics," "The Quarrel," and "The Illumination." Here the personal voice controls poetic intensity, not the other way round. "Route Six," for example, begins:
The city squats on my back.
I am heart-sore, stiff-necked,
exasperated. That's why
I slammed the door,
that's why I tell you now,
in every house of marriage
there's room for an interpreter.
He proposes that he and his wife jump into the car, with their cat, to head for Cape Cod: "We'll drive non-stop till dawn" until they see "Light glazes the eastern sky / over Buzzards Bay." The poem concludes with a simple statement: "The last stretch toward home! / Twenty summers roll by." What begins in ego ends in illumination of Self, light and a sniff of salt air summing up an instant of life more than would acres of solitary contemplation.
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'Imagine Wrestling with an Angel': An Interview with Stanley Kunitz
A review of Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978