Stanley Kunitz provides his readers with the excitement, rarely encountered in modern poetry, of exploring both the guilty and the joyful recesses of the personality. Of guilt alone, we have perhaps had more than our share, and the pilgrimage from sin to salvation has become—who would have believed it a generation ago?—almost fashionable. But relatively few have moved, as Mr. Kunitz has in his thirty-year poetic career, from darkly morbid psychic interiors to a clean, well-lighted place, where personality is integrated through love and art—love that draws nourishment from the unabashedly physical and art that, though complex, rests on the honest simplifications of life.

I

Though Kunitz's literary life and manner are difficult, one of his central ideas is extremely simple. He has said, "Let life happen to you … Life is right," and he believes that modern neurosis in part stems from the morbid separation of art from life that characterizes our culture. The naked prose statements will impress only those who admire the dignified Johnsonian ability to state without fear of triteness the essential commonplaces of life and art. But expressed in his poetry the same idea possesses verbal vigor and imagistic shock, especially in that series of brilliant life-death antitheses whose polarities constitute the major contention of his major poetry.

In the early poetry the negative or life-denying side of the contrast receives the greater emphasis and is embodied in the important image of the skeleton and in other images that cluster about it. Kunitz imagines bones as clean, hygienic, disinfected, shapely, sharp—the

but irrevocably and horribly dead. The death-image is composed not of decay, blood, exposed viscera, smells of disintegration, but of harsh, dry, and defined things like needles, spines, spikes, sand, stones, leafless branches, scalpels, peeled nuts, and shadows on the wall. In "The Surgeons" death is symbolized by skillful, professional savages who open the brain of a child, dissipate its dreams, and cut away all pity and love. These men of knife and bone are systematic, amputating men who hate tradition and passion and whose despair of the future matches their scorn of the past.

Kunitz's symbols of life, which seem to predominate in the later poems, are better if one prefers the constructive and wholesome to the bitterly angry. The old-clothes man, unlike the surgeons, does not create but mobilizes wounds. He collects the decaying coats behind the door, the scraps and rags of past experience—dead ambitions, buried love, lost innocence. But this tatterdemalion army, as ragged as Jack Falstaff s, is an invincibly human one:

In a recent poem, "The Thief," in which the poet curses a ladrone who picked his pocket clean in a crowded Roman train, Kunitz gives his favorite antithesis an autobiographical context. The unpleasant loss evokes recollections of both historical Rome and the poet's own personal Rome, which he remembers from the lantern slides shown at school. But that Rome, he now knows, was a "pedagogic lie," and the careful reader of Kunitz sees that that Rome ("the frozen pure") has become a symbol of stony, skeletal death. But the real Rome, with its elbowing mobs, its thieves, its jogging carrozze, and its stones baroquely shaped by Bernini, is all motion, impure like emotion, flawed by mutability,

Kunitz likes the blooming, bacterial rot the surgeon cuts away to expose his dead and flinty surfaces. For the poet, the blood, the guts, the "bubbling brain, exploding life's gray tumor," and the "green-celled world" where our "blind moulds" kiss have their compensatory side: they blaze with life as well as death. Alexander Pope recoiled in horror from the crawling maggoty world which in the Dunciad he created to symbolize Grub Street. But Kunitz finds decay a pre-condition of existence, the very compost in which life sprouts:

In fierce decay I'll find a stripe
Of honey sweetening the tart
Old brain. I shall not know again such ripe
Beauty of the burst, dark heart.

Kunitz believes, in Gospel phrase, that "Except a corn of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit":

I lie awake, hearing the drip
Upon my sill; thinking, the sun
Has not been promised; we who strip
Summer to seed shall be undone.

Now, while the antler of the eaves
Liquefies, drop by drop, I brood
On a Christian thing: unless the leaves
Perish, the tree is not renewed.

II

Kunitz has said in prose that "every poem must be loaded with a full charge of experience" and in verse,

We cannot, without more information than we now possess, trace the poetry back to its biographical source. But as critics we must ask that unsophisticated, essential, and difficult question: does the poetry have on it the bloom of first-hand experience?

Kunitz was born in 1905 of Russian-Jewish parents, and in his verse there is the shadowy outline of a changing response to his Jewish heritage. The following early lines seem to sound a note of revolt against the family and its traditions:

Now I must tread the starry wrack
And penetrate the burning sea.
Iscariot, I may come back,
But do not wait for me.

In 'Tor the Word is Flesh" the poet apparently confesses to hearing "the fierce / Wild cry of Jesus on the holy tree" at the very moment he says to his dead father that he has

And the impression from the earlier poetry is confirmed by a comment on his boyhood days in one of his latest poems,

For nothing pleased me then in my legacy.

World War II seems, from the evidence of the poetry and from that alone, to have restored the poet's ties with his personal past, for the following lines must surely be autobiographical (The man of the first lines is, I believe, Hitler, the ancestors of the third and following lines are his immigrant parents, and the second paragraph refers to the Nazis, persecuting the Jews and perhaps also invading Russia):

When I stand in the center of that man's madness,
Deep in his trauma, as in the crater of a wound,
My ancestors step from my American bones.
There's mother in a woven shawl, and that,
No doubt, is father picking up his pack
For the return voyage through those dreadful years
Into the winter of the raging eye.

One generation past, two days by plane away,
My house is dispossessed, my friends dispersed,
My teeth and pride knocked in, my people game
For the hunters of man-skins in the warrens of Europe,
The impossible creatures of an hysteriac's dream
Advancing with hatchets sunk into their skulls
To rip the god out of the machine.

Two of Kunitz's best poems, "For the Word is Flesh" (from the 1930 volume) and "Father and Son" (from the 1944 volume), represent strongly diverse responses to antithetical father-images, or, if the biographical identifications I propose are wrong, antithetical responses to the same father-image, or perhaps something more complicated than either of these alternatives. (The two poems are obviously now intended to be read together since they are printed on opposite pages in the 1958 volume.) The earlier poem belongs to the period of Kunitz's impatience with his heritage—or lack of one—and his horror at the surgically produced skeletons of modern life. Among these enemies of life he has placed his father—or at least a generic father whom the speaker of the poem addresses—now a lipless skeleton:

Let sons learn from their lipless fathers how
Man enters hell without a golden bough.

It may be relevant to note that Kunitz's father died a suicide at thirty-eight, a few weeks before his son was born, and to quote the poet's comment, "Of my father I know almost nothing except that he was a free-thinker and a Mason who left behind a collection of good books."

In the later father-poem tenderness has replaced anger. This poem, I suggest hesitantly, is addressed not to Kunitz's father but his stepfather, Mark Dine, "of all men I have known … the gentlest," who lived with the family only six years before he died of a heart attack. The stepson was then fourteen. In the poem from which I quote here only the last paragraph, the spirit of Mark Dine has been transmuted to unalloyed poetic gold:

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 of 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.

The two father-poems also represent responses to the poet's national and religious heritage. In the first he confesses that he "cannot blur / The mirrored brain with fantasies of Er," but in the second a suffering and chastened man seeks wisdom in the Gemara of his father's gentleness.

Kunitz's love poetry has always been perceptive and persuasive. Neither Puritanical or prurient, it never stridently tempts us to eat forbidden fruit. It has sometimes been tremblingly tender, as in "Night-piece," when men sigh good night,

and urge, "Let us be shy again like feathered things"; and sometimes jealously amorous as in "The Science of the Night," when the lover, his manhood lying on a rumpled field, his beloved sprawled carelessly in sleep, imagines that she returns to people and places he has never known.

Kunitz's poetry introduces two Ladies, an Early Lady and a Later Lady, who must correspond to his experience in the subtle way that art always corresponds to the reality out of which it springs. The Early Lady is imprecisely outlined. She appears fleetingly in the surrealist landscape of the first poems; and the experiences in which she figures are frustrating ones, not unlike the situation in Gertrude Stein's most beautiful story, Melanctha, in which one lover's love is too early and the other's is tragically too late:

For love is coming or is passing by,
And none may look upon her features plain.

How shall these tarry, how shall these meet,
When he must remember and she forget?
Her baby-heart is running down a street
Already ended, his to a place not yet.

The Later Lady has provided both lover and artist with his deepest fulfillments. Although a person of an earlier secret life lived apart from his own and although a person of a wild, adventuring spirit for whom the boldest astronomical imagery may even be restrained, this Lady has also evoked the most delicate, urbane, and courtly poetry Kunitz has as yet written. The Lady, herself an artist, transforms the raw music of life to measured harmony; metaphysical of mind, she provokes and appreciates the subtlest intellectual joke. But even the Early Lady—a Dark Lady who spoke the serpent's word—is never really lost to life and experience. She may, like the ooze of souls, be too virulent to die. She may be one of the blind wounds the old-clothes man comes to mobilize. In any event, she has taught the poet a hard, hard lesson:

We learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong
Less to what flatters us than to what scars.

III

Kunitz has published three volumes of poetry, in 1930, 1944, and 1958. Intellectual Things, the first of these, contained fifty poems, most of them short lyrics in the modern metaphysical manner made fashionable by T. S. Eliot.

The bold images and scenes remind one of Donne, but the urbane language, the exquisitely flowing music, and the syntactical precision recall Marvell. Donne's sense of evil in the marrow, his moral and psychological frankness, his imaginative originality in combining geography, mathematics, science, and statecraft with love-making and worship—all these have their impressive counterparts in Kunitz. But Donne serves a modern purpose; and his tight, though outrageously literal scholastic logic, his firm sense of intellectual outline, his essential fidelity to nature even when his combinations disfigure its surface, Kunitz distorts into an imagistic surrealism that provides intense experience without providing paraphrasable meaning. Man dissolves in a cooking vat of chemicals that stands alone on a crumbling rock. A poetic speaker compares himself to a crystal bead in a crystal ball, "So pure that only Nothing could be less." Twilight invades a room in which glowing lions congregate and in which the poet, also tawny, awaits the approach of night, as the day and his heart spill their blood to slake his lips, when suddenly the moon, tawny like man and lion, materializes at the door. A human body swells in corruption until in death it becomes a whale that, like a derelict vessel, is pillaged by the curious. Lovers eat their ecstatic hearts and kiss in "complicate analysis of passionate destruction." The poet creeps deep into his own self, where he lies on the burning plumage of an angel and so lives his entire life all at once.

In thus delineating Kunitz's surrealist landscape, I have been guilty of separating image and context. In its proper place the imagery does more than shock. It attacks the modern simplifications of human nature that reduce it to one dimension and omit the vital parts. Kunitz's outrage is that of the anti-body against a destroying foreign presence. Blood, organ and sinew swell in protest, and a feverish brain tries to expel the attackers of our vital centers.

"Single Vision," which I have chosen to represent the 1930 volume, is so tightly coherent that it must be quoted in full. The action seems to be this: one of Kunitz's surgeons, a lost man, rises in a resurrection scene that recalls Donne and, in one image—though if there was conscious intent it must have been to draw a contrast—Piero della Francesca's great painting in which Christ rises with a banner in his hand. The rising man is a Kunitzian skeleton, taught to reject love and the blood and to refine away the flesh. But as he rises, persisting life rises with him and all that goes with life—the unused evil in the bones, the stain of reality on the brain, and the pride of blood unimaginably unfurled at his side. In sympathy with these life-symbols, the skeleton, now in remorse, sheds the tears of the soul and then slips into the silence of the bony and dusty grave which modern, life-disinfecting, hollow men have prepared for him:

Before I am completely shriven
I shall reject my inch of heaven.

Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink
Into my deepest self; there drink

Memory down. The banner of
My blood, unfurled, will not be love,

Only the pity and the pride
Of it, pinned to my open side.

When I have utterly refined
The composition of my mind,

Shaped language of my narrow till
Its forms are instant to my will,

Suffered the leaf of my heart to fall
Under the wind, and, stripping all

The tender blanket from my bone,
Rise like a skeleton in the sun,

I shall have risen to disown
The good mortality I won.

Directly risen with the stain
Of life upon my crested brain,

Which I shall shake against my ghost
To frighten him, when I am lost.

Gladly, as any poison, yield
My halved conscience, brightly peeled;

Infect him, since we live but once,
With the unused evil in my bones.

I'll shed the tear of souls, the true
Sweat, Blake's intellectual dew,

Before I am resigned to slip
A dusty finger on my lip.

In 1944 Kunitz's second volume of verse, Passport to the War, appeared, containing fifty poems in all, twenty-six of which had not before appeared in book-form and twenty-four of which were re-published from the earlier volume. Lines like

The silence unrolling before me as I came,
The night nailed like an orange to my brow,

and others, recalling early De Chirico,

Through portal and through peristyle
Her phantom glides, whose secret mouth,
The absence of whose flagrant smile,
Hangs on my chimney like a wreath of cloud,

show that the earlier metaphysical-surrealist manner continues. But it is now combined with themes of contemporary political and social reality; and a new style of expression, that may suggest Robert Frost, introduces greater colloquial flexibility and greater human warmth. Anger remains, but it is a satirical anger aimed at recognizable targets: Hitler, the Nazis, the Bitch Goddess Success, military men of any nation, and a new, dangerously pervasive savagery. "Reflections by a Mailbox," "Night Letter," and "Father and Son"—unfortunately all too long to quote in full—add new power to the old without obliterating the Kunitzian signature, which remains unmistakable throughout his entire career.

The best moments are still those that explore the individual's soul. The new social themes remain languid until they disturb the psyche. But though not notable in themselves as programs of action or ways of life, the new social reality has brought drama and scene into sharper focus even in the metaphysical moments. Consider the increased intensity of that stunning poem about evil in the dream and in the soul, "The Fitting of the Mask," the inspiration for which Kunitz seems to have derived from a passage he greatly admired in Rilke's Journal of My Other Self. I quote the poem entire as an example of the new power of the 1944 collection:

"Again I come to buy the image fated."
"Your valued image, sir, and that's a pity,
Is gone, I mean the youth, the undefeated,
Whose falcon-heart, winged with the golden shout
Of morning, sweeps windward from his native city,
Crying his father's grief, his mother's doubt."

"You knew I cared, and that I'd come for him;
The traffic hindered me; you should have known."
"Ah there, that's bad! But my poor memory's dim
As a bell that rings the tide in; I lose track

Of things to keep and things to sell, and one
Can never be quite certain who'll come back."

"Enough! There was another face, a bright
Pathetic one I'll take, from whose wild stain
Of sympathy a man could borrow light."
"Our catalogue describes him 'Fool of Love,
Fragile and dear, tinctured with mortal pain,
Buys grain of his grain and eats the chaff thereof.'"

"Your cataloguer has the cynic touch,
But I'll forgive him. Is our business over?"
"Be patient, sir. You would not thank me much
Or recommend my baffling merchandise
If I should offer this unblessed believer,
This torn-cheek, with the chasm in his eyes."

"Old man, I'm in a hurry to proceed,
And everyone, you know, must wear a mask
Give me a countenance to meet my need
Or malice will expose me at the dance."
"Oh sir, we'll try, but it's no easy task
To make adjustments to your circumstance;

And now, while my assistant turns the key
And in the windows now the lights go out,
For it is closing time irrevocably
Until new features sit upon the forms,
I'll sing a little ditty to the ghost
That occupies this world of empty frames.

[Sings:]
Good-fellow's lost among our Psychic Cases,
The Angry Man has turned a ghastly blue,
Munich exhausted all our Judas-faces.
And what are we to do, and what to do?
The Optimist was mangled in a sock,
The rats conferred and ate The Wandering Jew,
There's nothing left that's decent in our stock,
And what are we to do, and what to do?

But look!—here's something rare, macabre, a true
Invention of the time's insomniac wits.
Perhaps we ought to sell it to the zoo.
Go to the darkening glass that traps your shames
And tell me what you see."

"O Prince of Counterfeits,
This is the Self I hunted and knifed in dreams."

Kunitz's Selected Poems 1928-1958 contained eighty-five poems, of which one-third were new and the remaining were republished from the two earlier volumes. The latest poems make the old metaphysical boldness even bolder and intensify the already unparaphrasable imagistic intensity. At the same time, the long colloquial line of 1944 has now become a marvel of flexible strength. Suffusing these familiar effects is a golden romanticism that had earlier been only a hesitant soupçon of better things to come—a strain that from the beginning invoked poets of the romantic generation, notably Blake.

The title Intellectual Things (1930) was adapted from Blake's famous sentence, "For the tear is an intellectual thing," which Kunitz used as the epigraph of that volume. In a memorable phrase Kunitz defined the "tear of souls" (in contrast to modern, dry-as-dust, skeletal powder) as the "true sweat, Blake's intellectual dew." Some four poems in that volume, none of which Kunitz has chosen to reprint, are vaguely Blakean and romantic: "Death in Moonlight," "Sad Song," "Thou Unbelieving Heart" (which contains lovely lines but may not be as fully integrated as at first appears), and "Elemental Metamorphosis" (which contains a stronger recollection of Wordsworth's "Three Years She Grew" and "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal" than of anything in Blake). But except for certain lines these poems did not achieve the magic of the Songs of Innocence and Experience because they are too lush or because they remain flat and smooth and imprecise, like the romantics at their least impressive. In "Open the Gates" of the 1944 collection, however, Kunitz, perhaps unconsciously, has achieved an effect in the first two stanzas that is authentically Blakean—but recalling not so much the purely lyrical Blake as the verbal-visual Blake of emblems like the frontispiece to Jerusalem or the haunting "Death's Door":

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.

In the 1958 volume the Blakean strain grows into something fresh and lovely: in the poem to the delicate white mouse, "The Waltzer in the House"; in the emblematic allegory, "The Way Down"; in the exquisite "As Flowers Are," a lovely poem that draws on the wars and loves of the flowers—Erasmus Darwin refined into quintessential Blake; but above all in that delicate aubade, "When the Light Falls," a poem of urbane compliment which combines Ben Jonson's courtly, classical elegance and Blake's power of deep and elemental suggestion:

When the light falls, it falls on her
In whose rose-gilded chamber
A music strained through mind
Turns everything to measure.

The light that seeks her out
Finds answering light within,
And the two join hands and dance
On either side of her skin.

The lily and the swan
Attend her whiter pride,
While the courtly laurel kneels
To kiss his mantling bride.

Under each cherry-bough
She spreads her silken cloths

At the rumor of a wind,
To gather up her deaths,

For the petals of her heart
Are shaken in a night,
Whose ceremonial art
Is dying into light.

Kunitz's poetic virtuosity is such that it fully vindicates his own aesthetic belief that meaning in verse is "a product of the total form." But like his peers and even his betters, he is not an absolutely impeccable craftsman, and there are some fifteen separate occasions on which one reader grieved in reading the latest collection, from which the poet has excluded what he considers his earlier failures—grief usually over a word, line, or image, only rarely over an entire poem or one of its crucial sections.

Kunitz has said that "there is only one artist, the true, recurrent, undying wanderer, the eternally guilty, invincibly friendly man." It is tempting to apply that sentence to its author. The joyous love lyrics, the austere but amiable reviews of younger men's work, his comments on his teaching experiences, in which he has delighted in engaging the inquisitive spirits of even the faltering beginners—all this makes us want to say of him that he must be "an invincibly friendly man."

As poet Mr. Kunitz appears also as the "eternally guilty" man:

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…?
Agh! I am sometimes weary
Of this everlasting search
For the drama in a nutshell,
The opera of the tragic sense,
Which I would gladly be rid of.

But Mr. Kunitz need not be embarrassed. "Complicate" guilt is one of his most excitingly exploited themes, absolutely without the theatricality he seems to impute to it in the lines just quoted.

What can Kunitz mean when he calls the artist the "true, recurrent, undying wanderer," and can this part of the sentence also be applied to him? I think it can, and I judge it to mean that a poem—to interpret Kunitz by Kunitz—"repeats for us man's spiritual ascent, identifying whoever shares in its beauty with those obscure thousands under the hill of time [this image Kunitz has used more than once in his poetry] who once climbed … and climb again the forbidding slope." That is, a true work of art is a kind of secular All Souls' Day sacrament, that brings us into communion with struggling men of all days and ways, with dead poets who have celebrated those struggles, and with the heroes of myth and legend who have memorably embodied them for the whole race. "The Approach to Thebes" reveals the true poetic "wandered" in the full meaning of Kunitz. Oedipus, who speaks the lines of the poem, has encountered and overcome the Sphinx. He now approaches Thebes, about to become its king—not joyfully but in solemn sadness since a prophetic vision reveals to him the horrors that will with the years be heaped upon his head. But he comes prepared: the winning of the Sphinx has irrevocably tied him to life itself. In overcoming her, he has mastered it:

In the zero of the night, in the lipping hour,
Skin-time, knocking-time, when the heart is pearled
And the moon squanders its uranian gold,
She taunted me, who was all music's tongue,
Philosophy's and wilderness's breed,
Of shifting shape, half jungle-cat, half-dancer,
Night's woman-petaled, lion-scented rose,
To whom I gave, out of a hero's need,
The dolor of my thrust, my riddling answer,
Whose force no lesser mortal knows. Dangerous?
Yes, as nervous oracles foretold
Who could not guess the secret taste of her:
Impossible wine! I came into the world
To fill a fate; am punished by my youth
No more. What if dog-faced logic howls
Was it art or magic multiplied my joy?
Nature has reasons beyond true or false.
We played like metaphysic animals
Whose freedom made our knowledge bold
Before the tragic curtain of the day:
I can bear the dishonor now of growing old.

Blinded and old, exiled, diseased, and scorned—
The verdict's bitten on the brazen gates,
For the gods grant each of us his lot, his term.
Hail to the King of Thebes!—my self, ordained
To satisfy the impulse of the worm,
Bemummied in those famous incestuous sheets,
The bloodiest flags of nations of the curse,
To be hung from the balcony outside the room
Where I encounter my most flagrant source.
Children, grandchildren, my long posterity,
To whom I bequeath the spiders of my dust,
Believe me, whatever sordid tales you hear,
Told by physicians or mendacious scribes,
Of beardless folly, consanguineous lust,
Fomenting pestilence, rebellion, war,
I come prepared, unwanting what I see,
But tied to life. On the royal road to Thebes
I had my luck, I met a lovely monster,
And the story's this: I made the monster me.

The sensitive and trained reader of these lines cannot escape believing that the Sphinx of the legend the poet has made to correspond profoundly to the Later Lady of the love-lyrics and that therefore Oedipus must be, in ways too deep to follow, a richly autobiographical character. The poem virtually equates the mastery of the lovely monster with the mastery of life itself, and that equation measures both the difficulties and the rewards of the conquest.

Kunitz has said, "No poetry is required of any of us. Our first labor is to master our worlds." No poetry is indeed required, but it is most welcome when, like that of Stanley Kunitz, it authentically reports the breaking and the making of a poet and his world.