Stanley Kunitz
From Philosopedia
Stanley Kunitz (29 July 1905 - 14 May 2006)
Kunitz, once the United States Poet Laureate, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of Solomon Kunitz, a dressmaker, and Yetta Helen Kunitz, a Lithuanian-Jewish mother.
He graduated summa cum laude in 1926 from Harvard University and earned a master's degree in English the following year. After Harvard, he worked as a reporter and editor. He served in the US Army during World War II. Although a conscientious objector, Kunitz served as a non-combatant and was discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. After the war, he began a teaching career that spanned several decades, including a 22-year stint at Columbia University.
Kunitz's poetry has won praise from all circles as being profound and well written. He continued to write and publish as late as 2005, at the age of 100. Many believe his poetry's symbolism is influenced significantly by the work of Carl Gustav Jung. Kunitz was an influence on many 20th century poets, including James Wright.
His marriages to poet Helen Pearce and actress Eleanor Evans ended in divorce. His third wife, artist Elise Asher, died in 2004.
Kunitz divided his time between New York City, New York, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, for most of his life. He enjoyed gardening and maintained one of the most impressive seaside gardens in Provincetown.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Medal of Arts recipient.
Kunitz died of pneumonia at his home, 27 West 12th Street in Manhattan. He had previously come close to death, and reflected on the experience in his last book, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.
Books
- The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (2005)
- The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (2000)
- Passing Through, The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995)
- Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)
- The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1928-1978) (1978)
- The Testing-Tree (1971)
- Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (1958)
- Passport to the War (1940)
- Intellectual Things (1930)
Philosophy
In a 2005 interview in The New York Times, 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.
To People, he said of his work: "The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that self-dialogue."
Mark Wunderlich, of the Academy of American Poets, interviewed Kunitz on 10 Augus 1997, and the following was recorded]:
- Wunderlich: What is the role of poetry in our culture? We have so many media we can choose from--film, video, performance, etc. What does poetry have to offer the human spirit this late in the millennium? Why poetry?
- Kunitz: Poetry is the medium of choice for giving our most hidden self a voice--the voice behind the mask that all of us wear. Poetry says, "You are not alone in the world: all your fears, anxieties, hopes, despairs are the common property of the race." In a way, poetry is the most private of all the arts, and yet it is public, too, a form of social bonding. It gains its power from the chaos at its source, the untold secrets of the self. The power is in the mystery of the word.
- Wunderlich: What is the relationship of the self to your poetry? You spoke earlier about the mask. Is writing your attempt to penetrate the mask, and are you more successful at that now than you may have perceived yourself earlier? Is it easier now?
- Kunitz: Yeats said that if you wear a mask long enough, it will become your face. That's the danger, of course. The hope is to do away with the need for the mask, to create a persona that grows with you, that is not fixed in one period in time. The evolving biological self is also an evolving spiritual self. I can see that the persona of my early poems is far different from the persona of my later poems, because I am different. And yet there is a continuity, a strain of selfhood, that runs from the beginning of the life to the end. As I put it in the opening lines of "The Layers": I have walked through many lives, Some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
- Wunderlich: Many of the poets you loved--your early influences--Herbert, Donne, Blake, Hopkins--I think of as essentially religious poets. What is your relationship to religion?
- Kunitz: I do not subscribe to any organized religion, yet I think of myself as a religious person, and that's independent of any kind of faith or practice, or belief in God. While I was still in college I fastened on the phrase "the holiness of the heart's affections" in one of Keats's letters, and it has stayed with me ever since. To me, that's religion. "I am certain of nothing," he wrote, "but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination." Though I am in no danger of conversion, the poets you mention as early influences--Herbert, Donne, Blake, Hopkins--still speak to me and light the way.
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.
