 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) |
|
American poet, editor, essayist, translator, whose career
spanned
nearly 80 years. Stanley Kunitz became 10th poet laureate at the age of
95,
succeeding Robert Pinsky. Kunitz's first collection of verse appeared
in 1930. He wrote in conversational tone of such complex themes as the
work of a poet, loss, time, and the chaos of inner life. Kunitz's
self-scrutinies in the realm of the soul are touching but calm and
restrained: "If I could cry, I'd cry, / but I'm too old to be /
anybody's child." His poetry has been translated into more than a
dozen languages. "How should I tell him my fable and the fears, Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Family
tragedies shadowed Kunitz's early life: his father, Solomon Z. Kunitz,
committed suicide in a public park a few weeks before his son's birth.
The prosperous dress-manufacturing business, that his parents operated,
was discovered to be bankrupt. His mother, Yetta Helen (Jasspon), an
immigrant from Lithuania, opened a dry-goods shop to support her
family. She refused to talk about her late husband and erased all the
memories of of his life: "locked his name
/ in her deepest cabinet". When Kunitz was 14, his stepfather, Mark Dine, died. Kunitz's sisters married and died young. The theme of lost father frequently appeared in his poems. 'The Portrait' opens with the lines "My mother never forgave my father/ for killing himself" and 'Father and Son' from Kunitz's second collection explored a son's grief at the loss of his father. Traumas haunt also the life of the next generation, as in 'Journal for My Daughter': "You say you had a father once: / his name was absence. / He left, but did not let you go." (from The Testing-Tree, 1971) Kunitz was educated at Worcester Classical Highschool. There
he
became enthralled by the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), whom
Swinburne praised as "the greatest song-writer ever born of English
race." Other writers who inspired him during these years were John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, William
Wordsworth, and William Blake,
whose devotion to inner visions Kunitz has much shared. He frequently
visited the public library and the local art museum. "Poetry emerges
out of the mystery and secrecy of being,'' Kunitz once said. ''It is
the
occult and passionate grammar of a life.'' Noteworhy, although
Worcester was a city of immigrants, both of Kunitz's parents were
European immigrants, and he had an Irish teacher who rallied against
foreigners and Jews, he never developed a sense of belonging to an
immigrant family. Managing to win a scholarship, Kunitz entered Harvard in 1922, and graduated summa cum laude at the age of 22. The Worcester Telegram-Gazette published in 1926 Kunitz's interview of the rocker pioneer Robert Goddard. Because of his Jewish background, Kunitz was told indirectly that he could not continue as an assistant at the English Department: "Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew." Embittered, Kunitz left Harward and then worked as a reporter, editor, and later unsuccessfully as a small farmer during the Depression. He also spent some time in Europe, editing the Wilson Library Bulletin from abroad in France and Italy. While working as an editor, he contributed poems to such
magazines as Poetry, The Dial, The Nation, The
New Republic, and Commonweal.
In 1927 Kunitz tried to find publisher for Bartolomeo Vanzetti's
letters – Vanzetti, an anarchist, had been convicted and sentenced
to the electric chair with Nicola Sacco after a controversial murder
trial. Intellectual Things, Kunitz's first collection of poems, appeared in 1930. Its metaphysical explorations of "the vast, uncharted reaches of the inner world," as one critic wrote, did not fit in the main currents of modernism, and Kunitz kept a hiatus of fourteen years before he published his next collection. During the 1930s and early 1940s Kunitz co-edited for The H.W. Wilson Company a series of biographical reference books about authors – the series is still among the best in its field. In 1944 Kunitz published Passport to the War, which contains one of his most famous poems, 'Father and Son'. In this highly individual collection Kunitz did not bow to his critics with its boldy imaginative use of language and social and political themes. Like his first book, it did not stir the interest the literary establishment. It was not until 1958 when Kunitz gained acclaim with Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. "I keep trying to improve my control over language, so that I won't have to tell lies." (Kunitz in Contemporary Poets, 1975) Regarding his religious background, Kunitz defined himself as
a
freethinker rather than an atheist, saying once that "Moses and Jesus
and Lao-tse have all instructed me. And all the prophets as well, from
Isaiah to Blake." During World War II Kunitz was a conscientious
objector. He had wished to join the Medical
Corps, but eventually he served three years in the army as
kitchen porter or digging latrinens largely in North Carolina, where he
also edited an Army news magazine and wrote for the Air Transport
Commant. "A combination of pneumonia, scarlet fever, and just
downright humiliation almost did me in," Kunitz later recalled. ('Stanley Kunitz, The Art of Poetry, No. 29,' interviewed by
Chris Busa, The Paris Review,
Issue 83, Spring 1982) In 1945 Kunitz was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant.
He spent a
year in Santa Fe on a Guggengeim grant and began his teaching career at
Bennington College. There he replaced his close friend, the poet
Theodore Roethke, who suffered from a bout of manic depression. Since
then Kunitz held many teaching posts, among others in Yale, Princeton,
Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia University in
the graduate writing program. One of his students was the future
Nobel laureate Louise Glück. Kunitz admired
her work, saying that "everything she touches turns to music and
legend." (A to Z of
American Women Writers by Carol Kort, rev. ed. 2007, p. 110) In the early 1960s Kunitz saw the state of American poetry higher than it ever has been, and called it a "Silver Age." Compared to British poets their American colleagues took more risks, but the Beat poets according to Kunitz managed only produce squeals and bleats after Allen Ginsberg's Howl. He was not particularly enthusiastic about experimental poetry as such – "A writer is experimental or dead. Most of the writers, however, who insist on labelling themselves in capital letters as experimental are merely betraying their insecurity." ('Poetry's Silver Age,' in Writing in America, ed. by John Fischer and Robert B. Silvers, 1960, p. 40) You have your language too, Kuniz travelled in several countries in Europe and Africa on
lecture
and reading tours. In 1967 Kunitz visited the Soviet Union, travelling
from Moscow to Tbilisi. This journey inspired him to translate poems
from such Russian writers as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and
Andrei Voznesensky. However, he did not know a word of Russian, but
relied on the literary versions of the Oxford scholar Max Hayward; he
was the outstanding Slavist of the period. (Conversations with Stanley
Kunitz, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, 2013, p. 182) Kunitz's several literary awards include the Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship, Harriet Monroe Award, and Ford Foundation Award. In 1993 he received the National Medal of the Arts in 1993 and in 1999 an 'In Celebration of Writers' award from Poets & Writers. At the age of ninety, he won a National Book Award. Kunitz was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in the mid-1970s and in the 1980s he was the first State Poet of New York. In 1968 Kunitz founded in Provincetown the Fine Arts Work Center, a resident community of American artists and writers. With Elizabeth Kray he founded in 1985 Poets House on Spring Street in SoHo. In 1955 his selected poems, Passing Through, won the National Book Award. "The poem comes in the form of a blessing," he remarked, ""like the rapture breaking through on the mind," as I tried to phrase in my youth." ('Instead of a Foreword,' in Passing Through by Stanley Kunitx, 1995, p. 12) Kunitz was married three times. In 1930, he married Helen
Pearce, a
poet. They restored in Wormwood Hill, Connecticut a farmhouse which was
destroyed by a tornado. After the divorce in 1937 he never saw her
again. Two years later he married Eleanor Evans, an actress. With her
Kunitz raised chickens and planted trees in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Many of Kunitz's late poems were about love. From 1958 he was
married to the painter Elise Asher, who died in 2004. For her Kunitz's
wrote in his nineteeth year one of his most moving lines in 'Touch Me'
(1995): "Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, /
remind me who I am." For a long period Kunitz divided his time between
Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was
occupied by his 2,000-square-foot terraced garden facing the bay. The
garden was a subject of many of Kunitz's poems. In 'The Snakes of
September' he described a pair of snakes, "dangling head-down, entwined
/ in a brazen love-knot." After a cardiac irregularities and exhaustion in 2003, the garden became for Kunitz also a source of renewal. Kunitz died of pneumonia on May 14, 2006, at his home in Manhattan at age one hundred. His last book was The Wild Braid (2005), a collection of essays and conversations. For further reading: A Feast of Losses: Yetta Dine and Her Son, the poet Stanley Kunitz by Judith Ferrara (2023); 'Stanley Kunitz,' in Writers and Age: Essays on and Interviews with Five Authors by Esther Harriott (2015); Conversations with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist (2013); With Robert Lowell and his Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others by Kathleen Spivack (2012); The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin & Stanley Kunitz by Jeanne Braham (2007); To Stanley Kunitz With Love: From Poet Friends for His 96th Birthday, ed. by Stanley Moss (2001); Interviews and Encounters With Stanley Kunitz by S. Kunitz (1990); A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz: On His Eightieth Birthday by Stanley Moss (1986); Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry by Gregory Orr (1985); Stanley Kunitz by Marie Henault (1980); Contemporary Poets, edited by James Vinson (1975); 'Kunitz, Stanley (Jasspon),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975) Selected works:
|
