About Stanley Kunitz Essay, Research Paper

Jay Parini

Kunitz was born inWorcester, Massachusetts, where he grew up; he

studied at Harvard College, receiving a BA in 1926 and an MA in 1927. He then moved to New

York, taking a job with the H. W. Wilson company as an editor of the Wilson Library

Bulletin; he also began at this time the work of collaboration with Howard Haycraft on

four important biographical dictionaries of English and American authors. His first book

of poems, Intellectual Things (1930) was barely recognized, and Kunitz did not

publish his second book, Passport to War, for another fourteen years. The Second

World War interrupted his career as editor, and when he was released from the army he

joined the faculty of Bennington College, the first of several academic jobs. Real

recognition came slowly to Kunitz, culminating in his receiving the Pulitzer Prize for

Poetry in 1958 for his first Selected Poems.

The witty, even defiantly intellectual first poems of Kunitz gave way, gradually, to a

more autobiographical verse (as in The Testing Tree, 1971), which reminded some

critics of Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell in their confessional phases. The poems of

recent years have been restrained but quietly passionate, as in ‘The Layers’, where

Kunitz writes: ‘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.’ Always, Kunitz writes with an almost passionate clarity and with attention to

formal details.

Kunitz has also worked as a translator, creating deft English versions of Russian poems

by Mandelstam, Yevtushenko, Stolzenberg, Akhmatova, and Akhmadulina. His critical essays

are collected in A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly (Boston, 1975).

Collections of verse include The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (Boston, 1979) and Next-to-last-Things

(Boston, 1985). For criticism, see Marie Henault, Stanley Kunitz (Boston, 1980)

and Gregory Orr, Stanley Kunitz (New York, 1985).

From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian

Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright ? 1994 by Oxford University

Press.