Stanley Kunitz

Poet and educator

• Born: July 29, 1905
• Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
• Died: May 14, 2006
• Place of death: New York, New York

Kunitz identified himself as a poet of nature, and he shared his love for the sea, the seasons, and the colors of the earth in his richly imaged poems. A celebrated mentor, he founded two educational centers for poets.

Early Life

Stanley Kunitz (KYEW-nihtz) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish parents. His father, Solomon, a dress manufacturer, killed himself before Kunitz was born. His mother, Yetta, immigrated to the United States from Lithuania; as a young woman, she worked in the sweatshops of New York’s lower East Side. After her husband’s suicide, she took over his dressmaking business. She remarried when her son was eight years old. Kunitz’s stepfather, Mark Dine, died five years later. The absent father is a recurring image in Kunitz’s poetry.

Kunitz was the valedictorian of his class at Worcester Classical High School, and he got a scholarship to Harvard University. He won the prestigious Garrison Medal for Poetry in 1926, the year he graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English. He completed his master’s degree at Harvard in 1927, intending to join the faculty. He stated in an interview that he was told that he “couldn’t hope to teach there because ’Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew.’”

After leaving Harvard, Kunitz went to work as a reporter on the Worcester Telegram and then as an editor for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York City. Kunitz made his living as a well-regarded editor of reference books for many years, sometimes freelancing from Connecticut or Pennsylvania while publishing his poetry. His earliest poems were collected in his first book, Intellectual Things, in 1930, the same year that he married poet Helen Pearce and bought a run-down hundred-acre farm in Connecticut.

Kunitz was divorced from Pearce in 1937. He married Eleanor Evans in 1939, and he lived with her on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Their daughter Gretchen was born in 1940. In 1943, at the age of thirty-eight, Kunitz was drafted and served in the U.S. Army until World War II ended in 1945. His second book of poems, Passport to the War, was published in 1944.

Life’s Work

With the help of his friend and fellow poet, Theodore Roethke, Kunitz was offered his first teaching position at Bennington College in 1946. He continued to teach for the next forty years; at first he worked in a series of short-term positions until he began a long-term association with Columbia University in 1963. Kunitz was a natural teacher who became an influence on a generation of American poets.

In 1958, Kunitz divorced Evans and married painter Elise Asher. His third book of poetry, Selected Poems, 1928-1958, the first to appear in fourteen years, was published. The book includes many of the works from his first two books as well as new poems. Selected Poems, 1928-1958 won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 and established Kunitz’s critical reputation.

Kunitz felt most at home outside the city. He and Asher began spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in 1962 they bought a house there. They spent the next forty years dividing their time between New York City and Provincetown. Kunitz was instrumental in organizing the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1968 and Poets House in New York City in 1985. After a visit to Russia on a cultural exchange program in 1967, Kunitz began working with Russian scholars to translate Russian and Eastern European poetry into English.

Kunitz’s fourth volume of poetry, The Testing-Tree, was published in 1971, thirteen years after Selected Poems, 1928-1958. This volume marks a turning point to a new, freer form of poetry. His translation, Poems of Akhmatova, was published in 1973. A prose volume, A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations, appeared in 1975, and The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978 (1979) won the Lenore Marshall Prize for the best book of poetry published in the United States in that year.

Then in his seventies, Kunitz began receiving more critical attention than at any time in his fifty-year career. He was appointed a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1974 to 1976. The first book-length criticism of his work was published in 1980. He was honored at festivals and by literary journals. The many poets who had been influenced by Kunitz put together a volume of poems, essays, and sketches called A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz on His Eightieth Birthday (1986).

Kunitz resigned from his regular teaching position at Columbia in 1985, the same year that Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays was published. He remained a dynamic speaker for the rest of his life, actively promoting poetry through seminars, readings, and lectures until he was nearly a hundred years old.

Many critics considered the quality of his poems to have improved with the passing years. Kunitz’s Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected won the National Book Award in 1995. The Collected Poems was published in 2000. Kunitz became tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the fall of 2000 at the age of ninety-five. A second tribute volume, To Stanley Kunitz, With Love from Poet Friends, was published on the occasion of his ninety-sixth birthday in 2002, with proceeds benefiting the Fine Arts Work Center.

Kunitz had a near-fatal health crisis in 2003, from which he recovered with a sense of spiritual renewal. After his wife of forty-seven years, Asher, died in the spring of 2004, he found much inspiration and solace in his Provincetown garden. Kunitz’s hundredth birthday in 2005 was marked by celebrations in New York and in Provincetown and by the publication of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Kunitz died of pneumonia on May 14, 2006, in New York.

Significance

By the end of his long life, Kunitz was considered the most distinguished and admired living American poet. He was remarkable for remaining vital and writing some of his richest work at an advanced age. His later work conveys a religious feeling of reverence for life by means of an intense connection with nature rather than by means of a sectarian faith. Kunitz is significant not only for his own fine poetry but also for his service to poetry. His conviction that artists should not work in isolation led him to found two artistic communities, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Poets House in New York. His teaching was invaluable to many younger poets and his role as Poet Laureate and his busy reading schedule brought poets, poetry and the public together.

Bibliography

Henault, Marie. Stanley Kunitz. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Considers the first fifty years of Kunitz’s career: biography, themes, forms, characteristics, translations, and prose writings.

Kunitz, Stanley. Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985. Kunitz speaks about his life and poetry in several autobiographical essays and an edited version of a 1982 Paris Review interview.

Kunitz, Stanley, and Genine Lentine. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Photographs, conversations, poems, and reflections of, with, and by the poet, centering on his long life in the garden.

Moss, Stanley, ed. A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz on His Eightieth Birthday. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 1986. Includes poems, essays, sketches, and reminiscences by a large number of Kunitz’s colleagues, peers, and students.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. To Stanley Kunitz, With Love from Poet Friends. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 2002. A tribute to Kunitz on his ninety-sixth birthday.

Orr, Gregory. Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. A critical study of Kunitz’s poetry, images, and themes by a poet who was his student.