Although Stanley Kunitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his Selected Poems, he is best known for the revolution in his style which occurred with the poems of The Testing-Tree, published in 1971. Robert Lowell (echoing virtually all the criticism devoted to Kunitz since that time) praised the volume for reflecting what he called “the drift of the age,” a movement away from tortured formality towards prosaic relaxation, away from metaphor and indirection towards clarity, the literal truth, Kunitz himself explained the change in this way: “A high style wants to be fed exclusively on high sentiments. Given the kind of person I am, I came to see the need for a middle style—for a low style, even, though that may be outside my range.” The statement correctly assumes that the voice of a poem ought in some way to reflect the personality of the poet; the style, after all, is the man.

I think we have a generally accurate notion of the kind of man Stanley Kunitz is. Much of his poetry is politically based, and his stance is consistently democratic; he sides with the people against the tyrants. He has, in short, far greater affinity with the middle or low than with the high. But it is a curious fact that the flattest, least satisfying—even least characteristic—poems in this volume [The Poetry of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978] are the political poems and the translations (which are themselves almost exclusively political, coming from such writers as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Yevtushenko). Among the rest of the more recent poems, the weakest are consistently those that most adamantly display the low or middle style; such poems as “Words for the Unknown Makers,” “My Sisters,” and “Journal for My Daughter” are simple, clear, literal and trivial, obvious, boring. In point of fact, Kunitz is at his best today, and has always been at his best, when writing in an elevated, rhetorical style.

The trouble with Kunitz's justification of his change in method lies in its first sentence, where the poet describes what he is rejecting: “A high style wants to be fed exclusively on high sentiments.” We will soon be looking at the high style, but for now must ask—what are high sentiments? Kunitz makes his early work sound like a series of lofty moral maxims, suitable for high-toned greeting cards or Victorian tea parties. In truth, the elevation visible in his strongest poems comes not from their high sentiments but from the powerful range of emotions which they enunciate. I would amend the sentence to read thus: Powerful emotions in verse are best presented through a powerful and rhetorical style. Whatever his social and political commitments, Kunitz is not a man of tepid emotions, and his more tranquil and reflective poems, which appear most frequently in his later work, virtually disappear under the fog of their blandness. For example, these lines from “My Sisters”:

I had two sisters once
with long black hair
who walked apart from me
and wrote the history of tears.
Their story's faded with their names,
but the candlelight they carried,
like dancers in a dream,
still flickers on their gowns
as they bend over me
to comfort my night-fears.

The lines were chosen for quotation because they do contain some emotion and some life; not enough, however, to transform the poem into anything more than a touching exercise in remembrance.

For contrast, let us look at another of the most recent poems—“The Knot,” which in fact opens this volume:

I've tried to seal it in,
that cross-grained knot
on the opposite wall,
scored in the lintel of my door,
but it keeps bleeding through
into the world we share.
Mornings when I wake,
curled in my web,
I hear it come
with a rush of resin
out of the trauma
of its lopping-off.
Obstinate bud,
sticky with life,
mad for the rain again,
it racks itself with shoots
that crackle overhead,
dividing as they grow.
Let be! Let be!
I shake my wings
and fly into its boughs.

This powerful lyric is dramatic in tone, and takes its strength from the skillful manipulation of several poetic devices. Perhaps the first thing that strikes the reader is the insistence of the rhythm; the lines are loosely iambic and vary from three beats to two beats in length. The stress pattern is made more prominent through heavy use of assonance, consonance, and internal rhyme. The individual sentences open with strong, dramatic phrases and end abruptly, always at the end of a line.

In the way it handles meaning, the poem is not literal, not direct, not in any way plain; it is, rather, firmly grounded in the suggestive obliquity of metaphor. The message, to which Kunitz has a strong emotional commitment, concerns growth, rebirth, freedom, a release back into life from dormancy. The painted-over knot is (against reality) allowed this process, in part through the agency of the speaker's dream. As for the speaker himself, his role is presented in terms of a sleeping caterpillar (“curled in my web”) that emerges to “shake my wings / and fly.” The story the poem tells is archetypal, even mythic, and is very similar to that told inmost of Kunitz's best poems. He has described the pattern himself, with great accuracy: “… my impulse towards form generally tends to move along the lines of certain ineluctable archetypes, particularly those of death and rebirth, the quest, and the night-journey (or descent into the underworld). In all three patterns—which may be consubstantial—the progress is from a kind of darkness into a kind of light.” This pattern (the three paths are indeed consubstantial) is especially prominent in the earlier work. When it is absent from the later work, the poems suffer from a lack of both thematic and artistic intensity; and when it is present there, as in “The Knot,” we suddenly see the true consistency in this man's art and life.

Kunitz's poems are delivered in an impressively authoritative voice; issues are heightened and generalized as in, say, the King James Bible. We could almost think at times that we were listening to one of the Old Testament prophets or chroniclers. An important part of this effect is owing to the narrative form in which the poems are cast; they are spoken almost in the form of parables. This quality is apparent in the opening lines of many poems, as we are plunged into what looks to be a timeless story of universal relevance. For example, each of these passages is the opening to a different poem:

Time swings her burning hands
I saw him going down
Into those mythic lands …
Soul of my soul, in the ancestral wood
Where all the trees were loosened of their leaves
I strayed …
Within the city of the burning cloud,
Dragging my life behind me in a sack,
Naked I prowl …
Concentrical, the universe and I
Rotated on God's crystal axletree …

Often, the ensuing poem will turn out to have only the portentous tone and form of a parable; what actually is described may be altogether more mundane, as in the poem—utterly typical of Kunitz—“No Word”:

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.
I prod the coals; my tortured faith
Kneels in the blaze on melting paws;
Jeweled with tears, the lonely beast
Bequeaths me irony and claws.
No message. May the mothering dark,
Whose benediction calms the sea,
Abater of the atrocious spark
Of love and love's anxiety,
Be kind; and may my self condone,
As surely as my judge reprieves,
This heart strung on the telephone,
Folded in death, whom no voice revives.

The apocalyptic tone of the poem—a common tone in Kunitz—issues from a not-very-exceptional situation: the death is that of a love affair; the complaint is that the beloved does not, will not, telephone. What gives the poem its considerable energy is the emotion of the speaker, which Kunitz translates into rhetoric and metaphor. We note in passing his heavy reliance on adjectives—general in his poems—“secret mouth,” “flagrant smile,” “tortured faith,” “melting paws,” “lonely beast,” “mothering dark,” “atrocious spark”—a technique that would ruin a plainer poem.

Kunitz learned his trade largely from the seventeenth-century British metaphysical poets—Donne and Herbert to be sure, but also their more baroque followers, Crashaw, Vaughan, Carew. In many passages illustrating this debt, we are reminded of another debt as well. Theodore Roethke was an early admirer of Kunitz; throughout the life of the younger, and more famous, poet, they nurtured one another with their work. It isn't always easy to say who influenced whom, but in lines like these from Kunitz, the similarities are nakedly evident:

Air thickens to dirt.
Great hairy seeds that soar aloft
Like comets trailing tender spume
Break in the night with soft
Explosions into bloom.
Where the fleshed root stirs …

There is a hyperbolic quality to most of Kunitz's work, as the passages I have quoted surely show. His love of rhetoric, metaphor, parable, the lushness of imagery and sound, is forever pushing him to the extreme edge of the possibilities of language. Such excess is of his essence, and shows his singularity. He has never been short on self-knowledge, and has always had the wisdom to keep faith in himself, his voice. When nearly all the participants in a symposium on the poem “Father and Son” objected strenuously to one of its lines—“The night nailed like an orange to my brow”—Kunitz defended himself at some length, and concluded: “Such moments in a poem, evident only by the pressure building behind them, can never fully explain themselves, but the poet must take his risk with them as an article of faith. In the end, for whatever it may be worth, they constitute his signature.” We can only be grateful to Stanley Kunitz for the courage he has shown throughout his career. The risks he has taken have ever sprung from inner necessity; they have the stamp of personal rightness upon them. Such is their undeniable signature.