Discussion Topics
To what extent does Stanley Kunitz use sensory detail in the poems that you have read? Does he involve all the senses?
The best poets use specific events in their poems to suggest larger, more universal truths. Do you find much in Kunitz’s poems that suggest universal truths?
What uses does Kunitz make of nature in his poetry? Cite specific examples.
Do you find references to people and characterization in Kunitz’s poetry?
What is Kunitz’s attitude toward death? Defend your answer by drawing specific examples from some of the poems that you have read.
Other literary forms
Stanley Kunitz (KYEWN-ihts) published numerous essays, interviews, and reviews on poetry and art. These are collected in A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations (1975) and in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985). In addition, he made extensive translations of modern Russian poetry, most notably in Poems of Akhmatova (1973, with Max Hayward) and Story Under Full Sail by Andrei Voznesensky (1974), and he edited and cotranslated Ivan Drach’s Orchard Lamps (1978) from the Ukrainian.
Achievements
In more than seven decades of writing poetry, Stanley Kunitz produced a corpus of work that is notable for its cohesiveness, its courageous explorations of the modern psyche, and its ever-broadening sympathies that adumbrate (with some fierce reservations and caveats) the unity of human experience. In language that always sustains a high degree of passionate dignity, never falling prey to the hortatory or didactic, Kunitz boldly knocked again and again on the doors of his obsessions with family, love, memory, and identity to demand that they surrender their secret meanings.
From the start of his career, Kunitz paid consummate attention to matters of form, as bespeaking, to use his borrowed phrase, “a conservation of energy.” Indeed, on numerous occasions, Kunitz spoke of form as a constant in art, as opposed to techniques and materials, which vary according to time and cultural necessity. Nevertheless, Kunitz’s later poems surprised his readers with their fresh embodiments: journal poems, prose poems, and free verse. At the same time, the poems retain the characteristically impassioned, sometimes bardic voice of the earlier work, a voice that constitutes an unbroken thread running through all his poetry.
In many ways, Kunitz’s work declares allegiance to the “flinty, maverick side” of American literature, the side inhabited by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and holds to humanistic values, independent judgment, self-discipline, and a distrust of power in all its modern manifestations, particularly in the hands of the state. At the same time, the poems bear witness to the individual’s spiritual yearnings in an age of decreasing sanctity at all levels. Although not explicitly a religious poet (“I’m an American freethinker, a damn stubborn one . . .”), Kunitz wrote poems that, nevertheless, remind readers of the tragic consequences that befall humans at the loss of that dimension. His achievement was “to roam the wreckage” of his own humanity in a way that was both highly personal and representative and to ennoble that pursuit with the transformative powers of his art.
Kunitz was honored with the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for poetry (1926), a Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine (1956), the Pulitzer Prize in poetry (1959), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1980), the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1987), the National Book Award in Poetry (1995), and the Shelley Memorial Award (1995) and the Frost Medal (1998), both from the Poetry Society of America. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1963. He served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1970 to 1996 and as consultant in poetry to...
(This entire section contains 491 words.)
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the Library of Congress from 1974 to 1976 and poet laureate consultant in poetry from 2000 to 2001. In 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Kunitz with a National Medal of Arts. In 2002, Kunitz was awarded the Massachusetts Book Medal for lifetime achievement. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945, an Academy Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1959, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1968 as well as a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Bibliography
Barber, David. “A Visionary Poet at Ninety.” The Atlantic Monthly 277, no. 6 (June, 1996): 113-120. This article includes a biographical survey and a brief review of some of the poet’s earlier works before turning to a heartfelt appreciation of Passing Through. Barber names Kunitz a “visionary” and sees his poetry as “transfiguring.”
Campbell, Robert. “God, Man, and Whale: Stanley Kunitz’s Collected Poems Show His Work Is All of a Piece.” The New York Times Book Review 150 (October 1, 2000): 16. This review of Kunitz’s poems, collected and published in his ninety-fifth year, offers comments about the broad spectrum of this poet’s writing over seven decades. One of the most insightful brief overviews of Kunitz in print.
Henault, Marie. Stanley Kunitz. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A good introduction to Kunitz for the beginning reader. Presents biographical detail and criticism of his poetry, discussing his themes, form, and techniques, and the “interior logics” of his poems. A sympathetic study lamenting the fact that Kunitz has not received the wide critical recognition he deserves.
Kunitz, Stanley. “An Interview with Stanley Kunitz.” Interview by Peter Stitt. The Gettysburg Review 5, no. 2 (Spring, 1992): 193-209. Offers a transcript of a 1990 interview and features a new poem, “The Chariot,” with commentary by Kunitz.
Kunitz, Stanley. “Translating Anna Akhmatova: A Conversation with Stanley Kunitz.” Interview by Daniel Weissbort. In Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, edited by Weissbort. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. An explanation of the history of the translation project, with a discussion of the methods employed by Kunitz and Max Hayward.
Lowell, Robert. “On Stanley Kunitz’s ‘Father and Son.’” In The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, edited by Anthony Ostroff. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Analyzes “Father and Son” and takes issue with a number of images in this poem, such as an orange being “nailed.” Despite his unfavorable response, Lowell acknowledges that Kunitz has “never published an unfinished and unfelt poem.”
Orr, Gregory. Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. A full-length criticism of Kunitz, noting that love and art are the two ways in which this poet seeks his identity. Discusses the key image, which Orr maintains is the single most important element in Kunitz’s work. The chapter on The Testing-Tree is particularly recommended.
Plummer, William. “New Beginnings: At Ninety-five, Fledgling Poet Laureat Stanley Kunitz Finds Fresh Wood.” People Weekly 54 (October 30, 2000): 159-160. Written for a popular audience, this overview of Kunitz’s life and work emphasizes that the poet has continued to grow. An excellent, humane assessment of a life of creative endeavor.
Vinson, James, ed. Contemporary Poets. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1980. The entry on Kunitz, by Michael True, examines his poetry as it retraces the “myth of the lost father.” Cites his devotion to craft and the high standards he strove to maintain throughout his work. Notes Kunitz’s earlier works as being more intellectual and his later ones as being more oriented toward feelings.
Weisberg, Robert. “Stanley Kunitz: The Stubborn Middle Way.” Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring, 1975): 49-57. In this sympathetic article, Weisberg laments that Kunitz’s “impressive” canon has aroused little critical interest. In discussing Selected Poems, 1928-1958, however, he criticizes Kunitz for being a “reincarnation of John Donne” but praises “The Words of the Preacher” for the energy that his other metaphysical lyrics lack. Includes an analysis of The Testing-Tree.