When asked by Christopher Busa in The Paris Review interview if he felt differently about translating the poems of Baudelaire, whom he could never know personally, than about translating the work of various contemporary poets, Stanley Kunitz replied “I know Baudelaire too.” Taken literally, Kunitz's contention might set a more speculative imagination to flights of wild conjecture. (“All poets are contemporaries,” he has said.) Think of the possible combinations of acquaintance that such time travel would allow. What species of exquisite naughtiness could Hart Crane and John Wilmot hatch, left to their own devices in the Ramble in Central Park? Allen Ginsberg would not think it strange to see Garcia Lorca pricing summer fruit or Whitman pawing the ground chuck in the fluorescence of a Berkeley grocery. Mightn't Ovid have benefited from Archibald MacLeish's diplomatic acumen in helping to grease his return to Rome from Tomis on the Black Sea? Literary gatherings would take on added luster: “Wystan, I'd like you to meet Quintus Horatius Flaccus—Oh, I see you're already acquainted.” Such reveries aside, Kunitz has something more serious in mind. To say that one may know poets long dead implies a transubstantiation between the flesh-and-blood poet and his incarnation on the page; this mystery manifests itself in the dual meanings of corpus—the physical body, a body of work (the Greek soma splits the same way). For his part, Kunitz has long been aware of the numerous intersections between the life and the work: “The life of a poet is crystallized in his work, that's how you know him”; or, as he put it on another occasion, “A poet's collected work is his book of changes”; and, finally, this Jungian distillate, “[Poetry] has its source, deep under the layers of a life, in the primordial self.”

At ninety, Stanley Kunitz has more layers to his life than most. Accumulated in those layers are the poems of nearly three quarters of a century, alongside which stand interviews and essays, the products of a mind occupied not only with poetry but the teaching of it. Traced accurately, Kunitz's pedagogical reach might encompass more contemporary American poets and poetry than any other living individual's; and, as his students and acolytes—Lucie Brock-Broido, Susan Mitchell, Louise Glück, and Michael Ryan among them—take on their own students (Brock-Broido now teaches in the Columbia writing program, where she once studied with Kunitz), his influence continues to grow exponentially. Marie Howe has said of his mentoring powers, “How can I tell you what he's taught us? I can't stand here and tell you that he fussed with my commas and line breaks. He changed my life. He changed the lives of so many of us.” As many artists will attest, to work on technique is to work on the bugbears and shortcomings in the self; poetry is “interwoven with the tissue of the life.” In Kunitz's Socratic phrasing from the preface to his most recent book, Passing Through: Later Poems, New and Selected, the poet puts it this way: “Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.” If poetry and the life are inextricable, then there can be no summary division between Kunitz's work as teacher and his work as a poet. The heuristic impulse applies to the making of poems as to the teaching of them: both endeavors function as aides to discovery. While, of necessity, Kunitz's discussions of verse take on a character distinct from his poems, both are mined from the same vein. Where the poems are highly refined, their metal hammered to a near transparency, his broader, more sententious reflections on the writing life display both the raw materials and by-products of the verse. His numerous interviews trade phrases with the poems; poems crystallize journal entries and bits of conversation. Here we get a further sense of soma—the life/work as a whole organism as opposed to its discrete parts.

2. “I STAND ON THE TERRIBLE THRESHOLD”

In the title poem of “The Layers,” a section of new poems from The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, published when he was in his seventies, the poet wrings the liquor from several of his apothegms quoted above:

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 darkest 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.

Here, Kunitz animates the life/work connection through metaphor. Each phase of the life marks a chapter recorded in a “book of transformations.” (All poets live contemporaneously; their quickening takes place on the page.) The final line of the poem, a credo of sorts, sounds as a refrain in Kunitz's interviews; with it he refers at once to himself and his art. This is powerful juju from a septuagenarian poet, who fifteen or so years down the line may now look back and see that he was right: His changes are not finished, and the ethos behind this continuous transformation shows no sign of flagging.

A telling facet of the poet's outlook glitters from “The Layers.” Not only is change continual for Kunitz, but often his changes are “already written.” Compare this generosity of spirit with T. S. Eliot, who is middle age could already envision a state where one “do[es] not hope to turn again.” (Kunitz states his turning not once but twice in the poem.) As A. David Moody suggests, Eliot, in “Ash-Wednesday” resigns the “hope of a renewal of youth's joy and strength.” For Kunitz, however, youth harbors the source of those primordial networks of images that give a poet the strength to live and write. Less a model than a foil, Eliot functions for Kunitz as a kind of influence manqué, someone to put his feet up against. Whereas the forty-year-old Eliot indulges his hopelessness, the seventy something Kunitz exults from deep within the layers of the life.

This striking affirmation notwithstanding, Kunitz's sterling optimism, more of the hard-won variety than the cock-eyed kind, remains burnished. Here is the first half of “The Layers” leading up to the poem's pivotal line with its insistent “turn”s:

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.

For the writer of a personal book of changes, the scope of “The Layers” could not be much broader. Far from milquetoast lyric composed to commemorate a fleeting observation, the poem assays life in its entirety, viewed back to front. At the center of the poem gapes a doorway dividing the past from the future, advantage point from which the poet may survey his surround; from this cusp Kunitz takes stock of his beginning and his end. Richard Jackson, in an interview with Kunitz, has pointed out the abundance of “thresholds” in the poems, as in “Open the Gates”: “I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see / The end and the beginning in each other's arms.” Again an echo of Eliot clamors from the wings, but even more nearly we hear the lines of the anonymous Scots poem “Balled of Sir Patrick Spence,” which Coleridge (another poet that Kunitz could claim to know) takes as an epigraph to his “Dejection: An Ode”: “Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms / And I fear, I fear, my master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm.” Signs and portents.

A storm rises in “The Layers” as well, blowing the dust of “those who fell along the way” into the poet's eyes. The speaker stands between the jambs of “I turn, I turn,” compelled to crane his neck in order to proceed forward. Behind, milestone dwindle into an expansive distance, slow fires trail; camps are abandoned, tribes scattered; the heart feasts on loss. The G-force on that tiny yet as it streaks into the atmosphere of the poem is nearly enough to squelch it. The turn is so tenuous starting out that it must be affirmed, gaining force in the repetition. Here the poet pivots in the doorway to peer forward again, but carrying the memory of what lies behind. Chilled in the penumbra of a recalled darkness, the speaker can exult only “somewhat,” but the will to proceed remains intact. In the transformative light of the speaker's resolve, fate, that aloof prankster, appears robed like grace; at the close of the poem, the next chapter of the life “is already written,” and in fact is being written as the poet peers past the lintel to utter at once a prophecy and a plea: “I am not done. …” A typographical representation of the poem would resemble one of Herbert's “Easter Wings.” The panorama of the past narrows as the speaker approaches his peripety at the poem's center (looking back, angels—of history?—are scavengers on heavy wings); from there the view expands again, opening, however tentatively, to an assured future. Herbert, a poet to whom Kunitz has long acknowledged indebtedness, concludes his poem with this angelic feather: “Affliction shall advance the flight in me.” Kunitz, in his, is similarly “compelled” to take stock of his afflictions before proceeding onward.

The next poem in Passing Through, from the 1985 collection, Next-to-Last Things, provides another point of intersection with Kunitz's more general poetic concerns. Noticing two garden snakes sliding among the conifers in his Provincetown plot, Kunitz murmurs:

I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

(from “The Snakes of September”)

Compare the end of this passage with its prose corollary, which Stanley Moss cites in his introduction to Interviews and Encounters: “All myths are the same, all metaphors are the same metaphor; when you touch the web of creation at any point, the whole web shudders.” Poetry for Kunitz aspires to the status of myth, and by placing us squarely in the center of received myth “Snakes” serpentines toward the creation of a new, personal one (“the effort is to convert one's life into legend”). The scene proceeds through dualities, a constant division of ones into twos. Structurally, the poem divides in half on the volta-like sixteenth line; here we read that it's noon, the hour dividing ante- from postmeridian. “September” situates the speaker in an equinoctial month, and one supposes it to be the 23rd, the first day of the fall (read the Fall); for in a garden where netherworldly serpents are “defiant of the curse / that spoiled another garden,” how could it be otherwise? The poem turns on “not so,” after which twos repair into ones: The two snakes twine together; the poet partners with the serpents; they become “co-signers of a covenant.” At Kunitz's deft handling of covenant, the whole web of Biblical myth shudders, from Adam to Moses to Jesus.

In the structural complexity of “The Serpents,” with its dense helix of images spiraling down through the poem, we may behold Kunitz's own braid/web of creation. If you prod one image in Kunitz, other poems register a reaction. “If we go deep enough,” the poet explains, in his interview with Jackson, “we may discover the secret place where our key images have been stored since childhood. There are chains of other images attached to them, the accretions of the years. A single touch activates the whole cluster.” This last bit is immediately recognizable as a second paraphrase of “The Layers.” While many of Kunitz's poems rework the same “key images,” poem calls to poem most explicitly in “Touch Me”:

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.

The italicized first line echoes the poet's “As Flowers Are,” from Selected Poems, 1928–1958, the contents of which are sadly omitted from the current Selected:

Summer is late, my heart: the dusty fiddler
Hunches under the stone; these pummelings
Of scent are more than masquerade; I have heard
A song repeat, repeat, till my breath had failed.
As flowers have flowers, at the season's height,
A single color oversweeps the field.

Kunitz's images, his personal archetypes, surface and resurface throughout his lyrics; the effect can be understood, not by reading one poem as separate from another, but by considering the work—poetry and prose—as a whole. In midcareer the poet traded the masterly pentameters of “As Flowers Are” for the sui generis “functional stressing” present in the later poetry quoted thus far—a loose trimeter or tetrameter line with ample variation where the ear dictates the intervals. Early Kunitz, which comprises three volumes—Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to the War (1944), and the 1958 Selected—employs a syntax and vocabulary that to today's ear may seem wantonly mandarin. These, however, are among the poems that Yvor Winters recommended to his students at Stanford. For many of that generation, Intellectual Things, by the precocious twenty-five-year-old, with its fluent formalism and lush syntax, was a manual on how to write verse. In the mid-Thirties Theodore Roethke, who at that time had yet to publish a volume of his own, appeared on Kunitz's doorstep wearing a raccoon coat and sporting a copy of that arresting first book. Inside, after a few drinks, Roethke proceeded to pay homage by reciting several of the poems from memory.

Part of Kunitz's evolution has been to thin out the linguistic densities of his early work, finding instead a pellucidity of surface and diction; the complexities of the later poems are formed in the layers hidden from ready view, which Kunitz locates “below the floor of consciousness.” Psychological richness replaces the early emphasis on prosodic richness. One may regret (as this reader does) the loss in Kunitz of the linguistic challenges of Intellectual Things. Formal brinkmanship, daring to go too far, while not always successful, can on occasion result in lines that lodge unassailably in the mind. If Passing Through were Kunitz's first book, would a young unknown show up with it committed to memory? Lines, yes; whole poems, no. Willfully weeding the poems of their surface mystery, Kunitz has labored to cultivate a mysterious interconnectedness in the inner tissue of a given poem and even between poems.

As the redeployment of the line from “As Flowers Are” suggests, while the early style may have developed into its virtual opposite—hermetic lines in received meters replaced by a “transparent” free verse—strings of recurring images endure, clinging in the web of the work in toto: “If you understand a poet's key images, you have a clue to the understanding of his whole work.” “Key images” is a felicitous phrase considering the extent to which locks and keys and doors operate in Kunitz's poems as just these kind of clues:

“Dante!” I cried
to the apparition
entering from the hall,
laureled and gaunt,
in a cone of light.
“Out of mercy you came
to be my Master
and my guide!”
To which he replied:
“I know neither the time
nor the way
nor the number on the door …
but this must be my room,
I was here before.”
And he held up in his hand
the key,
which blinded me.

(from “The Illumination”)

Set in a Paris hotel, the poem depicts a private heart of darkness, one in which the poet finds himself disconsolate, alone in a foreign city, his funds sapped. In this self-imposed exile from his native soil, the poet's most formidable demons conspire to haunt him: the parent he has denied, the friend he's failed, the hearts he's spoiled (“including my own left ventricle”). Out of this slough, poet calls to poet. An edition of Dante's Inferno, with engravings by Gustave Doré, which Kunitz knew in his childhood, figures in several of the poems, both early and late. As much as the Florentine's chthonic epic, the accompanying images by the nineteenth-century French engraver found purchase with the poet at that formative age. Doré's first plate in the Inferno, a depiction of Dante cowering in that dark wood, renders the pilgrim much as Kunitz does in “The Illumination”: “in a cone of light.” In the first Canto of the Comedy, the sun begins to rise, illuminating somewhat the savage wilderness and briefly bolstering Dante's spirits. Soon, Virgil, whom Dante calls maestro, appears. In “The Illumination” Kunitz paraphrases Dante's greeting in an address to his master; Alighieri's Paris incarnation, however, falters in his role as hoped-for Virgilian guide—he too is lost—and the key he proffers is blinding.

3. “THE KEY WHICH BLINDED ME”

Each image within a given body of work operates as a valise containing not only denotative meaning but the connotations accrued from the poet's deployment of that image elsewhere; hence, the “green thought” in “The Garden” can be grasped only in terms of Marvell's use of “green” throughout the body of his poems. What, then, is this “key” that Kunitz refers to, and what is it that is locked? The image reappears in “The Testing-Tree”:

Once I owned the key
          to an umbrageous trail
                    thickened with mosses
where flickering presences
          gave me right of passage.

As in “The Layers,” the “flickering presences” of the past, in this case the spirits of Wampanoag Indians, provide Kunitz with right of passage, but, as he discovers in “The Illumination,” the specters of the past, seen in that poem as private failings, can withhold imprimatur; in any case, they must be dealt with. In the early poem “Open the Gates,” in which Doré's images loom large, the poet again confronts his past as a requirement for stumbling forward:

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 …

Before being admitted, the poet must decipher the conundrum posed by his youth; the information he needs to untangle this curious legend—his life—he has carried with him on his back.

Depending from this chain of images rattles a passage from “The Portrait,” which Kunitz has called, along with “The Layers,” a poem of origins:

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.

Locked as it is the deepest cabinet, the specter of the lost father lurks as the oldest and most powerful in Kunitz's poetry of personal legend. Perhaps it is the mother's willful internment of the memory of her husband (later in the poem, she tears up her son's pastel rendering of his father) that has caused this ghost to pace the floorboards of Kunitz's poetry. The father, however, as in the last line of “Father and Son,” often makes no reply; in answer to his son's entreaties for his return, the father offers only “the white ignorant hollow of his face.” The image recalls Dante via Doré. In the Vita Nuova, a title Kunitz borrows for one of the poems written in his twenties, Dante employs his own “key” image: “Here me and then consider: am not I / The keep and key / Of all the torments sorrow can combine.” Certainly this heartsick questioning lies in the same register as the description of the mother's locked cabinet with its grisly contents; it bespeaks the same desolate horror of that Paris hotel room; it feeds at the feast of losses glimpsed from the center of “The Layers.”

4. “ALL MYTHS ARE THE SAME”

If there is a peculiarity, not quite a flaw, in Kunitz's later style of freighted imagery, it is the way a poem sometimes changes gears too quickly, leaving the reader behind, as the poem speeds on toward revelation. At the end of “The Snakes of September,” the poet moves from the particular to the universal, as the “wild braid of creation trembles” at his touch. The poem earns its conclusion on the level of meaning, but there is something overripe about that “wild.” This rapid tonal shift to an ecstatic register jars, and for an instant our attention is diverted to the machinery of the poem working slightly too hard.

In his best work Kunitz achieves these grace notes while sacrificing nothing in the build up. “The Wellfleet Whale,” a jeweled tiara of a poem, crowns the poet's achievement, and restores some of the linguistic pomp of the early poetry. The poem carries a prose epigraph, a journal entry describing the poet's encounter with a whale stranded on the beach. The whale, now in its death throes, opens one prehistoric eye to gaze on the poet. While Kunitz's long poem should be read in full, this passage from the fifth and final section, carries the signature of the whole:

Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,
          you brought with you the myth
                    of another country, dimly remembered,
where flying reptiles
          lumbered over the steaming marshes
                    and trumpeting thunder lizards
wallowed in the reeds.
          While empires rose and fell on land,
                    your nation breasted the open main,
rocked in the consoling rhythm
          of the tides. Which ancestor first plunged
                    head-down through zones of colored twilight
to scour the bottom of the dark?
.....                    Master of the whale-roads,
let the white wings of the gulls
          spread out their cover.
                    You have become like us,
disgraced and mortal.

The poignancy of the apostrophe, another of the poet's characteristic moves, derives from its personification of the doomed Leviathan. As with the September snakes or the titular salmon in “King of the River,” this creature from the natural world provides the poet with an appropriate catalyst for verse. Through these beasts Kunitz may refer to the human animal: “You have become like us.”

This suitability of the subject weds the suitability of the form; the concatenating tercets of “The Wellfleet Whale,” with their restless forward motion, provide Kunitz the sweep he needs to work this scene into the necessary tonalities, from the epic to the personal. By discarding inherited prosodic forms in his later poetry, Kunitz may be likened to a virtuoso who has left off playing from score and begun to improvise. Rather than grappling with standard measures, the poet relies on his own sense of a line's musicality to set the needed length and number of stresses. Echoing Blake, an abiding poetic forebear, and fellow seer, Kunitz notes, in an interview, “I must create a system myself or be enslaved by another man's.” Freed from rigid metrical contracts, this poet may better find the unique vessel appropriate to each poem. Oddly, Kunitz works out his two finest poems, “The Wellfleet Whale” and “The Testing-Tree,” in the same pattern of tercets wrought in numbered sections. This expansive form heightens the music of Kunitz's line:

You have your language too,
          an eerie medley of clicks
                    and hoots and trills,
location-notes and love calls,
          whistles and grunts. Occasionally,
                    it's like furniture being smashed,
or the creaking of a mossy door,
          sounds that all melt into a liquid
                    song with endless variations,
as if to compensate
          for the vast loneliness of the sea.
                    Sometimes a disembodied voice
breaks in as if from distant reefs,
          and it's as much as one can bear
                    to listen to its long mournful cry,
a sorrow without name, both more
          and less than human. It drags
                    across the ear like a record
running down.

(from “The Wellfleet Whale”)

Kunitz here submerges an ars poetica: “liquid song” sung “to compensate for the vast loneliness of the sea” could serve as the jacket blurb to this Selected. In the above passage we hear the whole symphony of Kunitz's musicianship: the pizzicato strings of “clicks and hoots and trills”; the legato horn of “location-notes and love calls”; the tympanic percussion of “a record running down.” All of this elegiac music, ostensibly for the dying mammal on that Cape Cod beach, borrows certain measures from the poet's life: as with Margaret in Hopkin's “Spring and Fall,” it is Kunitz that he mourns for, making “The Wellfleet Whale,” in its sweep and intimacy, the most far-reaching and potent of his many personal myths.

Part of the power of myths derives from our inability to pinpoint their exact meaning and message; they cannot be distilled to one-line thematic essence. Myth may be paraphrased, alluded to, stolen from, reworked, but its meanings resist the sound-bite; they are not fables with appended morals. In this sense, Kunitz's attempt to create a personal mythology, his legends of origin, has been wholly successful. More than isolated lyrics, the poems resonate, cross-pollinate, call to one another, and will not be reduced to incidental music. The dangers in writing a highly personal poetry of origins—dangers succumbed to by a number of Kunitz's epigones—include sentimentality and solipsism (the “who cares?” factor), which Kunitz's poems, happily, avoid. What registers instead emanates from the molten center of life-long experience, images transformed to poetry by their mystery and complexity, conveying human warmth, wisdom, and the poet's dearly held resolve to turn again, which is living itself.