Stanley Kunitz

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At the age of 95, Stanley Kunitz (born 1905) became the oldest person ever to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States. One of the finest American poets of the Twentieth Century, Kunitz produced only 12 books in more than 70 years, but the quality of his work remained consistent. Kunitz has earned many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Bollingen Prize in Poetry.

Haunted by his Father's Death

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 29, 1905. He was raised in a Lithuanian Jewish household in a working-class community, the son of Solomon Kunitz, a dressmaker, and Yetta Helen (Jasspon) Kunitz. His father killed himself shortly before Stanley was born "by drinking carbolic acid in a park," according to People magazine's William Plummer. Kunitz spent a lonely childhood. Birthdays were not celebrated in his house and his father's death was a taboo topic. Nevertheless, the tragic event visited Kunitz in his dreams, and later, as an adult, he grappled with the loss in his poems. The poem "End of Summer" evokes the event: "Bolt upright in my bed that night/ I saw my father flying;/ the wind was walking on my neck,/ the windowpanes were crying." In a later volume, The Testing Tree: Poems, published in 1971, Kunitz "ruthlessly prods wounds," according to Stanley Moss of the Nation. "His primordial curse is the suicide of his father before his birth. The poems take us into the sacred woods and houses of his 66 years, illuminate the images that have haunted him."

Despite his depressing home life, Kunitz excelled at school. He was class valedictorian at Worcester Classical High School and won a scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied under the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and rubbed shoulders with the future head of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer. In 1926, Kunitz graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English and enrolled in a doctoral degree program. He wanted to teach at Harvard, but anti-Semitic attitudes in the Ivy League proved to be an obstacle, and he dropped out after completing the requirements for his master's degree.

Kunitz took a newspaper job at The Worcester Telegram. The highlight of his journalism career was covering the 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists convicted of robbing and killing a Boston shoe factory paymaster and his guard. After the trial ended, Kunitz went to New York seeking a publisher for Vanzetti's letters. Though he failed to interest any editors in the project, he wound up staying in the city.

Early Success as Poet

Eventually, he moved to a farmhouse in Connecticut, where he wrote poetry and edited reference books for the H.W. Wilson publishing house. He was editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin and co-editor of Twentieth Century Authors. Around this time, his poems started appearing in some of the most prestigious literary magazines in the United States, including the Dial, New Republic, Poetry, and Commonweal.

In 1930, at the age of 25, Kunitz published his first book of poems, Intellectual Things. Kunitz's early poems reflect an opaque style influenced by English metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert. He later adopted a simpler style, more accessible to readers. His next book of verse, Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, published fourteen years later, likewise garnered critical praise. The poems in this volume reflected Kunitz's attempt to work out his anger on the page. "I had to address the trauma of my childhood and resolve it," he later told Plummer.

In 1959, Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize for his third book Selected Poems, 1928-1958. His next book, The Testing Tree: Poems, published in 1971, marked a significant departure from his earlier work. Poet Robert Lowell compared the two books in the New York Times Book Review by saying that the two volumes "are landmarks of the old and new style. The smoke has blown off. The old Delphic voice has learned to speak 'words that cats and dogs can understand."'

Other volumes by Kunitz include The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems, 1940-70 and The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, which appeared in 1983. The lengthy title poem of the latter volume recalled the beaching and death of a whale near his Provincetown, Massachusetts, home. Marie Henault in the Dictionary of Literary Biography called it "an austere and ambitious philosophic poem. … Its first-person-plural speaker gives the poem an elevated tone that allows the whale to become 'like a god in exile/ … delivered to the mercy of time. … "'

Expressed Political Views

Kunitz maintained a status as a conscientious objector during World War II, but he was drafted anyway and served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945. He was not forced to fight on the front lines but was assigned the task of cleaning bathrooms. Eventually, he rose to the rank of sergeant, but Kunitz never forgot his early humiliation. It took 20 years, but Kunitz finally got his revenge on the military. In 1965, he and fellow poet Lowell organized a Vietnam War protest that turned the White House Arts Festival into what Kunitz proudly termed "a passionate fiasco."

Kunitz's anti-government attitudes seeped into his poetry. From 1974 to 1976, Kunitz served as a poetry consultant in the Library of Congress's Poetry Office. His poem "The Lincoln Relics," which he wrote during those years, reflects his disdain for the U.S. government: "Mr. President/ In this Imperial City,/ awash in gossip and power,/ where marble eats marble/ and your office has been defiled,/ I saw 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?"

Kunitz believes the poet's role is to "demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience," as he told Washington Post staff writer Elizabeth Kastor. "It's a terrible power to entrust to people who are not spiritually great, that's all there is to it," Kunitz said of government officials. "You see it in the callousness, self-aggrandizement, insensitivity to the plight of the poor. In the general level of ethical conduct, the state has become an abomination."

Teaching Work

In 1945, Kunitz won a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, and a year later took his first teaching post at Bennington College in Vermont. During the 1950s and 1960s, he taught at several other institutions, including the New School for Social Research in New York, Brandeis University, the University of Washington, and Columbia University. From his early brush with anti-Semitism at Harvard, he went on to teach at Ivy League schools such as Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. But rather than settling on one campus, Kunitz preferred to do short-term stints. He thought that accepting a long-term commitment would stifle his creativity. "I never accepted tenure," he explained in an interview in the Boston Globe, "because I recognized that it would be fatal for me to be a professor who wrote poetry rather than a poet who had a job in the academy."

Through his writing and teaching, Kunitz amassed a group of proteges and friends that reads like a Who's Who of Twentieth Century poetry. His closest friends included Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Allen Ginsberg solicited Kunitz's comments before publishing "Howl," the Beat poem that defined a generation. Kunitz taught or advised well-known poets such as Carolyn Kizer, James Wright, Louise Gluck, and Robert Hass.

Kunitz's mentoring extended to the visual arts. He interacted with painters Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko and married artist Elise Asher on June 21, 1958. Each had one daughter from a previous marriage. The couple divided time between New York and Provincetown, where Kunitz ran Fine Arts Work Center, a colony for young poets and artists he founded in 1968.

In 2000, Kunitz was appointed to be the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States, the highest literary honor in America. In explaining the selection, Librarian of Congress James Billington said 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." Literary critics applauded the choice. "What sets Kunitz apart from most people," observed Henry Taylor in the Washington Post, "is his level of emotional intensity that historically has been difficult to maintain as one ages." The job requires recipients to give a reading at the start of their tenure, deliver an essay at the end, and help organize the library's literary programs. "It's a wonderful selection," Atlantic poetry editor Peter Davison told the Boston Globe. "Stanley is going to hold the office as a symbol of dedication to a life in poetry."

Despite his lofty achievements, Kunitz always maintained a solid grounding. Gardening became a lifelong passion for Kunitz and provided inspiration for his poetry. He tried his hand at farming twice in his life, first in Connecticut, then in Pennsylvania. The success of his 2,000 square-foot garden in the front yard of his Provincetown home is one of his proudest achievements.

Kunitz explained his fascination with nature to Contemporary Authors: "One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil." Indeed, he told the Boston Globe that gardening refreshed his spirit and prepared him for writing: "To conquer a piece of earth," Kunitz said, "an area of earth, and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself."

Books

Henault, Marie, Stanley Kunitz, Twayne, 1980.

Newsmakers, Issue 2, The Gale Group, 2001.

Periodicals

Boston Globe, August 27, 2000.

Nation, September 20, 1971.

New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1971.

People, October 30, 2000, p. 159.

Washington Post, May 12, 1987; July 29, 2000; October 1, 2000;June 21, 2001.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2001.

Stanley Kunitz
Born	Stanley Jasspon Kunitz 29 July 1905(1905-07-29) Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Died	14 May 2006 (aged 100) New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Harvard College

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (pronounced /ˈkjuːnɪts/) (29 July 1905 – 14 May 2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Poetry 3 Library Bill of Rights 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to dressmaker, Solomon Z. Kunitz and Lithuanian-Jewish mother, Yetta Helen Jasspon. His father committed suicide six weeks before he was born, and Kunitz was raised by his mother and stepfather, Mark Dine, who died when Kunitz was fourteen.

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude in 1926 from Harvard College and earned a master's degree in English from Harvard the following year. After Harvard, he worked as a reporter for The Worcester Telegram, and as editor for the H.W. Wilson Company in New York City until he was drafted in 1943. As a conscientious objector, Kunitz served as a noncombatant in the US Army during World War II, and was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. After the war, he began a teaching career at Bennington College, New York State Teachers College in Potsdam, New York, New School for Social Research, University of Washington, Queens College, Vassar, Brandeis, Yale, Rutgers, and a 22-year stint at Columbia University.

At Wilson Company, Kunitz served as editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin and as co-editor for Twentieth Century Authors, among other reference works. In 1931, as Dilly Tante, he edited Living Authors, a Book of Biographies. His poems began to appear in Poetry, Commonweal, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Dial.

Kunitz's poetry has won praise from all circles as being profound and well written. He continued to write and publish as late as 2005, at the age of 100. Many believe his poetry's symbolism is influenced significantly by the work of Carl Jung. Kunitz was an influence on many 20th century poets, including James Wright, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, and Carolyn Kizer.

His marriages to poet Helen Pearce and actress Eleanor Evans ended in divorce. His third wife, artist Elise Asher, died in 2004. Kunitz divided his time between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, for most of his life. He enjoyed gardening and maintained one of the most impressive seaside gardens in Provincetown. He was a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was a mainstay of the literary community, and of Poets House in Manhattan. He died in 2006 at his home in Manhattan. He had previously come close to death, and reflected on the experience in his last book, a collection of essays, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.

He was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience award in Sherborn, MA in October 1998. ^[2]

Poetry

Kunitz's first collection of poems, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930. His second volume of poems, "Passport to the War," was published fourteen years later when the author was serving on the European front in World War II. Although it featured some of Kunitz's best-known poems, the book went largely unnoticed and soon fell out of print. Kunitz's confidence was not in the best of shape when, in 1959, he had trouble finding a publisher for his third book, "Selected Poems: 1928-1958." Despite this unflattering experience, the book, eventually published by Little Brown, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His next volume of poems would not appear until 1971, but Kunitz remained busy through the 1960s editing reference books and translating Russian poets. When twelve years later "The Testing Tree" appeared, Kunitz's style was radically transformed from the highly intellectual and philosophical musings to more deeply personal yet disciplined narratives; moreover, his lines shifted from iambic pentameter to a freer prosody based on instinct and breath—usually resulting in shorter, three-four stressed lines. Throughout the 70s and 80s he became one of the most treasured and distinctive voices in American poetry. His collection Passing Through: The Later Poems won the National Book Award in 1995. Kunitz received many other honors, including a National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for a lifetime achievement in poetry, the Robert Frost Medal, and Harvard's Centennial Medal. He served two terms as Consultant on Poetry for the Library of Congress (the precursor title to Poet Laureate), one term as Poet Laureate of the United States, and one term as the state poet of New York. He founded the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City. Kunitz also judged for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He was considered by many observers to be the most distinguished and accomplished poet in the United States at the time of his death in 2006.

Library Bill of Rights

Kunitz served as the editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin from 1928 to 1943. In this capacity he was highly critical of librarians who did not actively oppose censorship. He published an article in 1938 by Bernard Berelson entitled "The Myth of Library Impartiality". This article led Forrest Spaulding and the Des Moines Public Library to develop the Library Bill of Rights which was later adopted by the American Library Association and continues to serve as the conerstone of intellectual freedom in libraries.

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (2005)
• The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (2000)
• Passing Through, The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995)
• Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)
• The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems
• The Terrible Threshold
• The Coat without a Seam
• The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1928–1978) (1978)
• The Testing-Tree (1971)
• Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (1958)
• Passport to the War (1944)
• Intellectual Things (1930)

Other writing and interviews:

• A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations'
• Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz

As editor, translator, or co-translator:

• The Essential Blake
• Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach
• Story under full sail by Andrei Voznesensky
• Poems of John Keats
• Poems of Akhmatova by Max Hayward

References

1. ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1971-1980". Library of Congress. 2008. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate-1971-1980.html. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
2. ^ The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Recipients List

External links

• Poems by Stanley Kunitz at PoetryFoundation.org
• Stanley Kunitz's page at "The Academy of American Poets"
• Worcester Area Writers - Stanley Kunitz
• Washington Post "Pulitzer-Winning Poet Stanley Kunitz Dies" 16 May 2006
• Stanley Kunitz "Three Small Parables for My Poet Friends" at the Oxford University Press blog
• "Halley's Comet" a poem by Stanley Kunitz
• Searching for Green Street: A Memorial for Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006
• http://www.videovoom.com/FilesForPeoplePoets/KunitzStanley/VideoPoemStanleyKunitzReadingTheLayersOn022006InNYCApt.htm

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

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