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Kunitz, Stanley July 29, 1905–May
14, 2006
Poet; editor; teacher; consultant in
poetry to the Library of Congress (1974–76); United States poet
laureate (2000–01); New York State poet laureate (1987–89). Stanley
Jasspon Kunitz was an unmistakably recognizable voice in 20th-century
American verse. A poem came to him, as he said, “in the form of a
blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind,” but he crafted it to
perfection with lapidarian patience and care for subtleties, without
losing the original inspiration and passion. An essential focus of his
was, in his words, on the theme “that we are all living and dying at
once,” one he embraced with a sense that he was “grasping everything
in this life that makes it beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, and
funny sometimes.”
In a eulogistic interview with Melissa
Block on National Public Radio, Marie Howe, one of the many younger
poets he had mentored, and a longtime friend of his, observed that he
“wrote always about transformation and change . . . at the
intersection of time and eternity.” She cited in particular his poem
“The Layers,” about surviving loss and grief and, in her words, “going
on as a transformed being.” Over the years Kunitz moved from an
intellectual style, partly in the metaphysical tradition and marked by
formal adherence to traditional rhyme and meter, to a leaner and more
openly autobiographical style, with natural speech rhythms. “His later
work is so transparent,” Howe observed, “so seemingly simple on the
surface, that all you hear is the sound of a soul speaking out.”
Kunitz, an agnostic, was born to Jewish
parents who were the proprietors of a dress-manufacturing business in
Worcester, Massachusetts. Apparently depressed by marital as well as
business problems, his father committed suicide (by drinking carbolic
acid in a public park) a few weeks before Stanley's birth, and his
mother (a seamstress who had immigrated from Lithuania) deleted any
and every vestige of her late husband's memory from her speech and
from the household. Along with a reiterated awareness of “the wild
braid of nature,” Kunitz's verse would be haunted by the mystery of
his absent father, a subject explicitly addressed in such poems as
“The Portrait” and “Father and Son.” Among the numerous influences on
his verse-making were the sprung-rhythm poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
and, apparently, Jungian psychology.
When he received his master's degree in
English at Harvard University in 1927, an anti-Semitic university
bureaucrat blocked his effort to remain at Harvard as a teaching
assistant, and he left the university in what he later described as “a
rage.” After a stint as a reporter and feature writer with the
Worcester Telegram newspaper, he moved to New York City. “By the
time I came to New York,” he would recall, “I was already a poet, a
freethinker, and a rebel.”
In New York he joined the staff of The
H. W. Wilson Company, a leading publisher of book and periodical
indexes, among other reference books and databases. He edited the
Wilson Library Bulletin from 1927 to 1943, when his employment at
the Wilson Company was interrupted by his induction into the U.S. Army
for service in World War II (despite his conscientious objection to
bearing arms). During his long association with the Wilson Company he
edited or co-edited (first with Howard Haycraft and later with Vineta
Colby) nine volumes in the company's series of
biographical/bibliographical dictionaries of literature, beginning
with Living Authors (1931) and including Twentieth Century
Authors (1942), British Authors Before 1800 (1952), and
European Authors, 1000–1900 (1967). All the while he was writing
poetry, slowly and scrupulously.
His first book of verse,
Intellectual Things, was published in 1930, and his second,
Passport to the War, appeared 14 years later. He won the Pulitzer
Prize with Selected Poems, 1928–1958 (1958). That volume was
followed by The Testing Tree (1971), The Terrible Threshold
(1974), The Coat Without a Seam (1974), and The Lincoln
Relics (1978). The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978
(1978) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Passing Through:
The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995) won the National Book
Award. Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays was published in 1985
and The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz in 2000. Kunitz edited the
Yale Series of Younger Poets (1966–77) and editions of the poetry of
William Butler Yeats and John Keats, and he was a co-translator of
several Russian poets.
As an adjunct professor he taught in a
graduate writing program at Columbia University from 1967 to 1985. He
had previously taught at Bennington College and directed poetry
workshops at several other schools. In Manhattan, where he lived, he
co-founded Poets House, a literary meeting place for poets and the
general public that includes the largest poetry archive in the United
States. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he
maintained a summer home and cultivated a celebrated seaside garden,
he co-founded the Fine Arts Work Center, which each year provides
residencies and stipends to 16 promising neophytes in the literary and
visual arts. His conversations with Genine Lentine, his literary
assistant, were central in the creation of the essays accompanying the
poems and photographs in The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century
in the Garden (2005). Kunitz's honors included a Guggenheim
fellowship, a Bollingen prize, and the National Medal of the Arts.
His third wife, the painter Elise
Asher, predeceased him. He had previously been married to and divorced
from Helen Pearce and Eleanor Evans. His survivors included a daughter
(from his second marriage), a stepdaughter, five grandchildren, and
three great-grandchildren. He died at his home in Manhattan, of
pneumonia.
See Current Biography (1959).
Obituary New York Times A p22 May 16,
2006
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