Stanley Kunitz won a Pulitzer Prize and
National Book Award. The cause was
pneumonia, his daughter, Gretchen Kunitz,
said.
Over the extraordinary span of his career -
nearly 80 years - Mr. Kunitz achieved a wide
range of expression, from intellectual to
lyric, from intimately confessional to
grandly oracular.
Among other honors, he won the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 1959, the National Book
Award in 1995, at age 90, the National Medal
of the Arts in 1993 and the prestigious
Bollingen Prize in poetry in 1987.
Mr. Kunitz was still at full power into his
90s and continued to write and give readings
until a few years ago. For almost 50 years
he spent his summers in Provincetown, where
he tended his lush garden. His last book,
"The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a
Century in the Garden," a collection of
essays and conversations produced in
collaboration with his literary assistant,
Genine Lentine, also a poet, was published
last year by Norton.
"What Kunitz's work lacks in glamour and
commotion it compensates for in serious and
decisive purpose," the poet David Barber
wrote in The Atlantic Monthly. "That no
shelf will ever groan under Kunitz's
collected poetry is a measure of his
daunting ambition as well as of his
scrupulous restraint."
Mr. Kunitz shunned shallow confession in
his art. "Poetry is ultimately mythology,
the telling of stories of the soul," he
wrote. "The old myths, the old gods, the old
heroes have never died. They are only
sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting
for our call. We have need of them, for in
their sum they epitomize the wisdom and
experience of the race."
They awoke in him slowly. His first two
collections, "Intellectual Things" (1930)
and "Passport to War: A Selection of Poems"
(1944), reflected his admiration for the
English metaphysical poets John Donne and
George Herbert and were admired more for
their craft than their substance.
"In my youth, as might be expected, I had
little knowledge of the world to draw on,"
he once told an interviewer. "But I had
fallen in love with language and was excited
by ideas, including the idea of being a
poet."
Yet much lay at the bottom of his mind,
waiting for his call. Ever haunted by the
suicide of his father six weeks before his
birth, he could approach the edge of pathos.
In a poem decisive in his development,
"Father and Son" (in the 1944 collection),
he wrote:
At the water's edge, where the smothering
ferns lifted
Their arms, "Father!" I cried, "Return! You
know
The way. . . .
Instruct
Your son, whirling between two wars,
In the Gemara of your gentleness,
For I would be a child to those who mourn
And brother to the foundlings of the field
And friend of innocence and all bright eyes.
O teach me how to work and keep me kind."
But the final two lines silence the outcry:
Among the turtles and the lilies he turned
to me
The white ignorant hollow of his face.
As he developed, Mr. Kunitz came to believe
in what he called "the need for a middle
style," one that didn't have "to be fed
exclusively on high sentiments," as he put
it. And in his mature work he contained his
passion in the formalities of his art. The
critic Vernon Young wrote in The New York
Review of Books: "Conspicuous, in the most
convincing of Stanley Kunitz's poems, is the
tension produced in them by a controlled
inhibition of the passion that threatens to
break through."
Or, as Mr. Kunitz himself put it in his
poem "The Approach to Thebes," (about
Oedipus):
Children,
grandchildren, my long posterity,
To whom I bequeath the spiders of my dust,
Believe me, whatever sordid tales you hear,
Told by physicians or mendacious scribes,
Of beardless folly, consanguineous lust,
Fomenting pestilence, rebellion, war,
I come prepared, unwanting what I see,
But tied to life. On the road to Thebes
I had my luck, I met a lovely monster,
And the story's this: I made the monster me.
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was born on July 29,
1905, in Worcester, Mass., the third child
and first son of the deceased Solomon Z.
Kunitz, a dress manufacturer whose business
had been failing, and Yetta Helen (Jasspon)
Kunitz. Because of his father's death,
Stanley was haunted by nightmares during his
childhood. But he proved a gifted student,
and after becoming valedictorian of his
class at Worcester Classical High School, he
entered Harvard on a scholarship in 1922,
graduating with highest honors in 1926.
He began writing poetry at the suggestion
of a professor, then set out to earn a
doctorate at Harvard. But on being told that
he would not be offered a lectureship
because the Anglo-Saxon students would
resent being taught English literature by a
Jew, he dropped out of the program in 1927
after completing the requirements for his
master's degree. Instead he became a
reporter and editor, first writing Sunday
feature articles for The Worcester Telegram.
He eventually settled in the country, buying
a run-down farm in Connecticut.
From his new home, Mr. Kunitz began working
in 1927 for the H. W. Wilson reference
company in New York City, serving as an
editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin and
co-editing "Twentieth Century Authors" and
other reference works. Under the pseudonym
of Dilly Tante, he edited a collection of
biographies titled "Living Authors: A Book
of Biographies" (1931). He began selling
poems to magazines like Poetry, Commonweal,
The New Republic, The Nation and The Dial.
In 1930, he married Helen Pearce. They
divorced in 1937, and two years later he
married Eleanor Evans. That marriage ended
in 1958, when he married Elise Asher, an
artist whom he met through his friendships
with painters like Robert Motherwell and
Mark Rothko. She died in 2004 at the age of
92.
In addition to his daughter, Gretchen, of
Orinda, Calif., by his second wife, Mr.
Kunitz is survived by a stepdaughter,
Babette Becker, of Manhattan, two
grandchildren and three step-grandchildren.
Mr. Kunitz continued as an editor for the
Wilson Company until 1943, when he was
drafted into the Army, despite being a
conscientious objector. (He refused to kill,
he said, because with the early deaths of
his two older sisters he had seen enough of
dying.) At a camp in North Carolina, he
edited a weekly Army news magazine, Ten
Minute Break, and wrote for the Air
Transport Command.
After World War II, he won a Guggenheim
fellowship and began a long career as a
teacher and founder of art institutions. He
first taught at Bennington College in
Vermont, where he also organized a literary
workshop. In 1949 he became a visiting
professor of English at the New York State
Teachers College in Potsdam, N.Y. The
following year the New School for Social
Research in New York appointed him director
of its Poetry Workshop.
He was also a founder of both the Fine Arts
Center in Provincetown and Poets House in
New York. Through both his writing and his
teaching at schools like the University of
Washington, Queens College, Vassar,
Brandeis, Columbia, Yale and Rutgers, he
influenced a generation of younger poets,
including them Louise Gluck, Carolyn Kizer
and James Wright.
Among his books were the Pulitzer
Prize-winning "Selected Poems, 1928-1958"
(Little, Brown, 1958); "Passing Through: The
Later Poems, New and Selected" (Norton,
1995), which won a National Book Award; "The
Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978"
(Atlantic/Little, Brown; 1979);
"Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays"
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985) and "The
Collected Poems" (Norton, 2000). In another
collection, "The Wellfleet Whale and
Companion Poems" (1983), the lengthy title
piece was based on an incident in which a
whale beached and died near his Cape Cod
home.
In 1987, when Mr. Kunitz was 81, Gov. Mario
M. Cuomo appointed him to a two-year term as
the official New York State Poet. Writing
for state occasions was not a requirement,
but Mr. Kunitz would have been reluctant to
in any case. "The poet is not in the service
of the state," he said of his official post.
"On the contrary, he defends the solitary
conscience as opposed to the great power
structure of the superstate."
His term as the United States poet laureate
was for one year, in 2000. From 1974 to 1976
he was the consultant in poetry to the
Library of Congress, a precursor to the poet
laureate program.
Mr. Kunitz was excited about the prospect
of poetry in the new millennium. "I see a
new aliveness with all the poetry slams, the
cowboy poets, the feminist and gay poets,
the experiments with rap," he told People
magazine. "It's like the beginning of the
19th century, the Romantic movement, which
started with street ballads."
Mr. Kunitz wrote slowly, usually on an old
manual typewriter, sometimes holding on to a
poem for years before letting it go. He
preferred to work at night, perhaps
reflecting the restless nights he endured as
a child. He insisted that the secret to his
longevity was his attitude: "I'm curious,"
he told People. "I'm active. I garden and I
write and I drink martinis."
In an interview in The New York Times last
year, he said he had become reconciled to
death and gave little thought to his legacy.
"Immortality?" he said, "It's not anything
I'd lose sleep over."
Of his work, he told People: "The deepest
thing I know is that I am living and dying
at once, and my conviction is to report that
self-dialogue."
In the concluding stanza of "The Long Boat"
he wrote:
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
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