[W. B.] Yeats is usually cited as the exception who proves the rule that most poets, after peaking somewhere in their 30s, steadily deteriorate as they get older. And Yeats, it seems, is mainly responsible for making Stanley Kunitz another such odd-man-out. If the early work in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 is anything to go by, its author's development was severely retarded by admiration for Innisfree and its environs. In recent years, however, he's stopped winding himself in ‘the bright thread of a dream,’ and turned his back on myth kitties. The first third of the book—it's arranged in reverse chronology—is consistently unillusioned and contains the rewards of half a century's effort to establish a durably sincere style and poetic personality.

But even while discovering his greatest strengths as a pragmatic realist, Kunitz is tormented by some aspects of his original romanticism. Inflated rhetoric and exaggerated self-consciousness are still liable to compromise him when he writes with an entirely straight face. He's obviously aware of this problem himself—‘I am not what I was,’ he says in ‘The Layers,’ ‘though some principle of being / abides’—and has adopted an increasingly wry tone of humour to cure it. This isn't used to evade seriousness, but to register its unavoidably preposterous, embarrassing and comic aspects. In doing so it enlarges the human application of poems like ‘River Road’ or ‘Signs and Portents,’ and thereby enlists a greater degree of sympathy than his earlier and more unremitting gravities.