Authors: Stanley Kunitz

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, Kunitz graduated from Harvard University. He published his first book of poetry, Intellectual Things, in 1930, the same year as his first marriage. Ironically and sadly, the event that had the most influence on Kunitz’s poetry was the suicide of his father six weeks before the writer was born. When he was fourteen, moreover, his stepfather died; perhaps as a result, he wrote much poetry in which quests for a father and for identity figure prominently. He also showed an early interest in the use of symbols related to home, family, loss, and love. Intellectual Things is written with a careful balance of allusions to religion, philosophy, drama, and earlier poetry, mixed with circumstances from Kunitz’s own life on the themes of death and the search for the father. Later, Kunitz developed the idea of “key images”—a term he employed to describe the universal image patterns he used in his poetry that retained their personal significances to him as a poet as well.

After obtaining his master’s degree from Harvard, Kunitz worked for the H. W. Wilson publishing company in New York until he was called to serve in World War II. He created and edited The Wilson Library Bulletin, for which he wrote a column. The reference books he wrote with coeditor Howard Haycraft became standard texts. Kunitz also edited the military newsmagazine Ten Minute Break while he was in the Army as a conscientious objector (1943 to 1945). In 1946, at the end of his service, Kunitz took a teaching position at Bennington College in Vermont, replacing the poet Robert Lowell. Following his year in Vermont, Kunitz arranged a variety of part-time teaching posts, mostly at East Coast colleges.

In 1937, Kunitz was divorced from Helen Pearce, his first wife, whom he had married in 1930. In 1939 he married Eleanor Evans. With his second wife, Kunitz had one daughter. They divorced in 1958; that same year, he married the painter Elise Asher.

In 1941, Kunitz began winning awards for his poetry. In 1944, he published Passport to the War, which continues the theme of the son’s search for the father but broadens to include pieces on the war. Central to this collection is the poem “Father and Son,” which is representative of much of Kunitz’s verse. In 1959, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. In 1963, Kunitz accepted a lecturer’s position with Columbia University in New York, a post he held in conjunction with visiting lectureships at Yale University in 1976 and Princeton University in 1977. In 1976, he also toured West Africa, giving poetry readings and lectures. Throughout his career, Kunitz continued to edit reference books on authors for the Wilson company.

In 1967, Kunitz was one of several writers who translated Andrei Voznesensky’s Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace. In 1973, he published his well-regarded translation Poems of Akhmatova with Max Hayward, who read the poems to him, as Kunitz had little facility in Russian. Then, as Kunitz later described the translating process, Hayward and he would review the prose translations Hayward wrote, and Kunitz would create a new poem in English that was faithful to Akhmatova’s original work. From this experience, Kunitz noted, he gained insight into how to use clear, direct language to create depth in poetry that is satisfying to both the writer and the reader.

Kunitz’s The Testing-Tree was a departure from his previous work in that it features unrhymed verse with differing line lengths. While he writes about identity, love, and loss in this collection, Kunitz also introduces an examination of the role of memory and the function of the imagination in poetry. He also addresses several of the poems to his daughter, enabling him to write about his own role as a father and to connect his evaluation with other themes in his work. In 1979, he published The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, a collection arranged in reverse chronological order that includes new poetry under the title “The Layers.”

In 1985, Next-to-Last Things was issued. An interesting collection of miscellaneous poetry and prose, it includes an illuminating memoir written by Kunitz’s mother in 1951, a year before her death at eighty-six. In 1987, Kunitz won two major awards for poetry, the Bollingen Prize and the Walt Whitman Award. In recognition of his lifetime achievement, Kunitz was chosen as the first New York State Poet, for the term from 1987 to 1989. In 1993, Kunitz’s collected interviews, which had first appeared in a variety of poetry magazines, were published in book form. In 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Kunitz with a National Medal of Arts. Kunitz’s next volume of poems, Passing Through, received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995. In 1998, Kunitz received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. In 2000, coincident with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States, The Collected Poems appeared; it was the first complete collection of Kunitz’s verse since the The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978. This chronologically arranged volume draws on all the earlier ones, showing readers the full range of Kunitz’s work.

Kunitz died in 2006, at the age of one hundred. He was predeceased by Asher, who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-two. His survivors included his daughter, Gretchen Kunitz; his stepdaughter, Babette Becker; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.