Stanley Kunitz, who once said that all poetry is born of love, is the country's newest poet laureate. And its oldest. He turns 95 today. The formal announcement will be made Monday by James Billington, Librarian of Congress.

“In my work, at this age,” said Kunitz from his summer house in Provincetown, Mass., “this is gratifying and astonishing. I must say, I was not prepared for that call.”

The nonagenarian is the 10th laureate in an impressive succession. He follows in the wake of Robert Penn Warren, Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Rita Dove and Robert Hass. Robert Pinsky has been poet laureate for the last three years.

In a statement, Billington said that Kunitz “continues to be a mentor and model for several generations of poets, and he brings uniquely to the office of poet laureate a full lifetime of commitment to poetry.”

Kunitz has been writing verse for a long time. His first poem appeared in 1930, the same year that T. S. Eliot published “Ash Wednesday.” I've forgotten many of those early poems,” Kunitz admitted. But he remembers others quite vividly.

He believes that an artist must reckon with the age in which he lives. “‘The Layers,’” he said, “speaks to that.”

From that poem:

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.

“I have known many of the great poets in the English language,” he said. “At least I encountered a good portion of the best poets of the 20th century.

“And I follow what is being written today in the contemporary journals,” he added. In fact, Kunitz is a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which offers residency programs to young poets and artists.

“Everything affects poetry,” he said, “including rap. I don't doubt that the poetry of the future, as even today, is influenced by the rap culture—just as in the 19th century poets who really initiated the romantic movement were influenced by the street ballads.”

Kunitz, who taught writing at Columbia University for years, has received just about every accolade available to a contemporary poet. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award and countless other trophies. He's been a senior fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts, the state poet of New York and a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. He's even been the Library of Congress's poetry adviser before. From 1974 to 1976 he served as the consultant in poetry at the library. That position evolved into poet laureate.

Those years here were tumultuous, he recalled yesterday. He wrote a poem about being at the library during Watergate. In “The Lincoln Relics,” he speaks to the 16th president:

Mr. President
In this Imperial City,
awash in gossip and power,
where marble eats marble
and your office has been defiled,
I saw the piranhas darting
between the rose-veined columns,
avid to strip the flesh
from the Republic's bones.
Has no one told you
how the slow blood leaks
from your secret wound?

He has written 10 books of verse. He plans to write more. His collected poems will be published this fall. The one-year appointment requires very little of the title holder. Kunitz will make ＄35,000 a year, maintain an office at the library and preside over special occasions—a reading in the fall and a lecture in the spring. He will also be able to hold forth on matters poetic.

“Given my years,” he admitted, “I will not be as active a poet laureate as Robert Pinsky has been.”

Kunitz doesn't plan to live in Washington.

Other professors and poets cheered the tidings.

“He's a wonderful poet,” offered David Gewanter, who teaches poetry at Georgetown University. “He can write wonderful short poems of nature that remind you of Robert Frost. And smart and wry poems about marriage, about life, about the ongoing negotiations of adults.”

“That's astonishingly wonderful news,” said Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor, who teaches poetry at American University.

“What sets Kunitz apart from most people,” he continued, “is his level of emotional intensity that historically has been difficult to maintain as one ages.”

Taylor spoke of one of Kunitz's best known poems, “Touch Me.”

An excerpt:

So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

“It's cry from the heart,” Taylor said, “about what it's like to be remarkably aged and be in love with the same woman one was in love with many years ago.”

Kunitz has been married to poet and painter Elise Asher since 1958. Each has a daughter by another spouse.

“What the poet laureate can do,” Taylor concluded, “is remind us, help us recognize, that poetry is part of our lives even when we don't think it is. Poetry is inescapable.”