Kunitz, Stanley, 1905-STANLEY (JASSPON) KUNITZ (29 July 1905 - ), American poet, editor and translator, has written:
My mother had little time to give to her family, and my older sisters seemed somehow detached from my secret life. When I was eight, I was presented with a stepfather, Mark Dine, a gentle and scholarly man who was no help at all to my mother in her business, but who showed me the ways of tenderness and affection. His death six years later left me desolate. Both my sisters married and died young. My mother survived these onslaughts, as well as another bankruptcy -- precipitated by her reluctance to discharge any of her employees in a time of depression -- and lived alertly to the age of eighty-six, articulate to the last on the errors of capitalism and the tragedy of existence. I was educated in the Indian-haunted woods behind our house at the edge of the city; at the Majestic and Bijou nickelodeons, where I saw nearly every early movie that was made; at the public library, which I ransacked daily for treasures; and in the Worcester public schools, from whose Classical High School I was graduated as valedictorian. I studied violin with Margaret MacQuade, a favorite pupil of the Belgian virtuoso Eugene Ysaye, and from her acquired a precious instrument, still in my possession, that he had once played. One morning in high school my English teacher, Martin Post, tossed away his textbook and changed my life by reciting one of Robert Herrick's songs. The play of language and the subtlety of the music enthralled me. From that day forward I lost my ardor for a concert career. Immediately after Herrick the poets who shook me were Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Blake. At Harvard, where I was a scholarship student, I immersed myself in the poetry of the Metaphysicals and pronounced myself an advocate of the Moderns, from Hopkins down to Joyce and Eliot and Cummings. These were the writers whose techniques I chose to investigate for my Master's thesis, much to the consternation of my triumvirate of mentors, Professors Lowes and Kittredge and Babbitt. Although I had been awarded the Garrison Medal for Poetry and had been graduated summa cum laude, I was ultimately denied a post as teaching assistant on the ground that 'Anglo-Saxons would resent being instructed in English by a Jew'. That, of course, was in the Dark Ages of academic history, but I left Harvard in a rage and have never felt right about my alma mater since. The best college memories I have are of the outsiders: Ford Madox Ford, who came from England to the Yard for a short-term residence, bringing his wheeze and his fabulous tales about the literary great; Robert Gay, visiting teacher of composition, who said to me, 'You are a poet -- be one'; and Alfred North Whitehead, serene and beatific man, at whose feet I sat, not caring whether I understood a word, in his first and my last year at Harvard. For several summers I had served an apprenticeship on the Worcester Telegram, and now I joined the staff as reporter and feature writer. Two of my assignments left a mark on me. I was the first newspaperman to interview Robert H. Goddard, professor of physics at Clark University, scoffed at locally as 'the moon man', after he had introduced the space age in a nearby field by firing his prototypal liquid-fuel rocket. Another Worcesterite whose path I crossed was Judge Webster Thayer, the frightened little man who sent Sacco and Vanzetti to their doom. Their case became my cause, and shortly after their executions in August 1927 I left for New York on a mission to find a publisher for Vanzetti's letters. Nobody would touch them then. Years later, when they were issued without my intervention, they were acclaimed as a noble and eloquent chapter in the American testament that is still being written. The early years of a writer are the decisive ones. By the time I came to New York I was already a poet, a freethinker, and a rebel. With the first money I saved from my new editorial job with The H. W. Wilson Company I departed for Europe, fully expecting to be fired; but Mr Wilson surprised himself by giving me permission to edit the Wilson Library Bulletin from abroad. When I returned a year later, I moved to a one-hundred-acre farm in Connecticut (that I purchased for five hundred dollars down) and continued to perform my editorial duties in absentia. My place in Mansfield Center was called Wormwood Hill, which has since given its name to a poetry magazine. Through the years of Depression I tilled its stony fields with a yoke of white oxen. By then I was married and had published Intellectual Things, my first book of poems. The title, from Blake's phrase, 'the tear is an intellectual thing', has generally been misconstrued as defining a cerebral type of verse, whereas in truth I meant to stress the inseparability of mind from body. As the thirties drew to a close, I was living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with my second wife. During Hitler's rise to power and the Spanish Civil War I became politically active as 'a premature anti-Fascist', though committed to a philosophy of non-violence and consistently too much of an anti-institutionalist to identify myself with any party of the Left. After Pearl Harbor I was confronted with the necessity of reconciling my conscientious objection with my overt desire for the destruction of Hitler and everything he stood for. I tried to solve the dilemma as honestly as I could by accepting military service and at the same time refusing to bear arms -- an unorthodox and unworkable arrangement that almost wrecked me for three years in the ranks. After my discharge I was invited to join the faculty of Bennington College at the instigation of my friend Theodore Roethke, and there began my long love affair with teaching. Since then, as a believer in mobility, I have taught at numerous colleges, always on a year-to-year basis, without tenure, without wanting to put roots down on any campus. My present connection is with Columbia, as adjunct professor, attached to the graduate school of writing. I am also a fellow at Yale, and since 1969 have been editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where I spend a good portion of the year with my third wife, the painter Elise Asher, I am associated with the Fine Arts Work Center, a community of young artists and writers. Our New York residence is in Greenwich Village. I have a daughter, Gretchen, by my second marriage. In the spring of 1967, under the aegis of the cultural exchange program jointly sponsored by the State Department and the Union of Soviet Writers, I made an extensive tour of the Soviet Union and gave an unprecedented series of lectures and readings, from Moscow to Tbilisi. Among the poets I have translated from the Russian, usually in collaboration with a linguist, are Voznesensky, Yevtushenko, and Mandelstam. In 1972 I completed and prepared for publication, with Max Hayward, a volume of translations from the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, and undertook the supervision of a collaborative project to translate the work of the contemporary Ukrainian poet Ivan Drach. As I look back, I can say, without apology, that I have lived a full, passionate, and productive life, of which poetry is the crystal and the flower. My loathing for bigotry and war, my feeling for plants and animals, my obsession with gardening, my zest for teaching and tennis, my pleasures of solitude no less than of companionship, my sense of mortality, my yearning for transcendence, my passion for the word [. . .] all seem to me of a piece. No doubt I would have written more poems over the years if I had made, in Yeats's phrase, 'a stone of the heart', but I am not persuaded they would have been worth the cost. Each morning I still wake to the challenge of the new day. As I once wrote in an essay: 'The hard, inescapable phenomenon to be faced is that we are living and dying at once [. . .] my commitment is to report that dialogue.' The first demand made on me is to survive. I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility. The vainest ambition is to want an art separated from its heritage, as though the tradition were a cistern full of toads instead of a life-giving fountain. A poet without a sense of history is a deprived child. Since my Selected Poems I have been moving toward a more open style, based on natural speech rhythms. The Testing-Tree (1971) embodied my search for a transparency of language and vision. Maybe age itself compels me to embrace the great simplicities, as I struggle to free myself from the knots and complications, the hang-ups, of my youth. I am no more reconciled than I ever was to the world's wrongs and the injustice of time. The poetry I admire most is innocent, luminous, and true. Stanley Kunitz is the son of Solomon and Yetta (Jasspon) Kunitz. Because he died before Kunitz was born, his father remained an enigma, whose unrevealed and therefore 'indomitable' love kept the poet for many years 'in chains', and who haunts Kunitz's poetry. As he says, Kunitz went to New York in 1927 and joined The H. W. Wilson Company, publishers of indexes and reference works. Under his editorship the Wilson Library Bulletin soon became something a great deal more stimulating and socially conscious than the house organ it was intended to be. The distinguished librarian Jesse Shera, looking back many years later, wrote: 'To our full buoyancy of youth, the Wilson Library Bulletin gave a generous share of hope, and joy, and aspiration [. . .]. With Stanley Kunitz at its head, it was a rallying point for a group of youngsters who were in hot revolt against tradition.' Intellectual Things (1930): Kunitz's poems began to appear in 1928 in such magazines as the Dial, Poetry, the Nation, and Commonweal. His first book, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930. It was received with a degree of critical attention that acknowledged the grandly ambitious scope of the poetic enterprise it represented. Many of these early lyrics, as one critic has said, are explorations of 'the vast, uncharted reaches of the inner world'. From these dangerous journeys the poet returns with news which, if it is sometimes personal to the point of obscurity, is often deeply revelatory of the connections between one man's sorrows and the general human tragedy, between biography and history, dream and myth. These poems are intricate and elliptical in their conceits, traditional in their meters, musical in their language, reminding many reviewers of Donne, Marvell, and Herbert. Nevertheless they could only have been conceived by a wholly -- even archetypally -- modern sensibility, alienated from self, society, and religion,'whirling between two wars', aware of Freud and Jung in a way which is evident in the highly visual and often surreal imagery. Some critics were troubled by the obscurities in these poems, or by a sense that strong feeling was being handled too gingerly, with intellectual tongs. But most readers seemed aware that they were witnessing the debut of a poetic talent that might well be a major one. Passport to the War (1944): A book of fifty poems, twenty-four of them from Intellectual Things, was published in 1944 -- fourteen years after the first volume. Many of the new poems were harsher than the old, full of skeletal and spiky imagery, and more overtly concerned with social and political themes, especially the spiritual pollution which the poet sees as the product of man's misuse of nature. Critics noted an increased and boldly imaginative use of scientific language and imagery, but some found poems in which the intensity of the poet's anger had marred his usually scrupulous craftsmanship. There were some fine poems, including the much quoted and discussed 'Father and Son', but Horace Gregory complained of a certain shrillness, 'a general lack of ease'. Selected Poems (1958): It was not until 1958, after another fourteen-year silence, that Kunitz's next book appeared (and only then, he has revealed, after it had been rejected by eight publishers, three of whom had refused even to read it). This was his Selected Poems, a third of them new, which brought him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. The new poems continued the history of a mind which, anguished and sometimes almost defeated in the earlier work, had now learned to 'suffer the twentieth century' and survive, finding solace and order and often joy in nature and art, and in human love:
But man's not taken. What the deep heart means, Its message of the big, round, childish hand, Its wonder, its simply lonely cry, The bloodied envelope addressed to you, Is history, that wide and mortal pang ('Night Letter'). Vivian Mercier wrote that 'the tension in the poetry has not slackened, but much of the strain (or straining) has disappeared'. It seemed to James Wright that 'his book shudders with life, and flings seeds in all directions [. . .] The publication of his Selected Poems is, I believe, an event of major importance for everyone who cares about art and human civilization in this country. The book stands on the terrible threshold of greatness.' The Testing-Tree (1971): These experiences may have helped to stimulate his interest in 'a more open style, based on natural speech rhythms', and therefore more suitable than his earlier work for public reading. At any rate, in his fourth book of poetry, The Testing-Tree, he had thrown away what Robert Lowell called 'the once redoubtable armor', the hermeticism and 'the passionate gnarl': 'All is unencumbered and trustful. One reads from cover to cover with the ease of reading good prose fiction.' This new directness of diction and syntax is the hard-won evidence of Kunitz's victory in what he calls 'my struggle to free myself from the knots and complications, the hang-ups, of my youth'. The old obsessions are still there -- the tyranny of time, the lost father, the death of love -- but fully confronted now, their intellectual or romantic disguises put aside. But this new simplicity is far removed from the tone of astonished simplemindedness fashionable in American poetry in the 1960s. Kunitz remains a poet in progress and his quest continues. He moves, in Stanley Moss's phrase, 'from the known to the unknown to the unknowable' as he always did; the difference is that now much more is known. 'The King of the River' is a poem about the last great journey upriver of the Pacific salmon, and also about a managing: 'The great clock of your life / is slowing down, / and the small clocks run wild. / For this you were born.' In 'River Road' the poet revisits a former home, where a marriage ended and he planted ten thousand trees:
I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mudpuddled nurselings in [. . .] I park my car below the curve and climbing over the tumbled stones where the wild foxgrape perseveres, I walk into the woods I made, my dark and resinous, blistered land, through the deep litter of the years. Few reviewers were in much doubt that, with several of the poems in The Testing-Tree, including certainly the title piece, 'River Road', and 'King of the River', Kunitz had passed over 'the terrible threshold of greatness'. Stanley Moss, 'blessed and tortured' by the book's artistry, wrote that 'Kunitz, now in his mid-sixties, has found his way. His self, poetry and nature are worked with as one consubstantive stuff. This accomplishment [. . .] should occasion a national holiday.' Robert Lowell called the volume an 'awesome offering of labor and self-knowledge [. . .]. I don't know of another [book] in prose or verse that gives in a few pages the impression of a large autobiography.' The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems (1983): The title poem for this volume is thought by many to be one of his finest, combining the grandeur and elevation of his early high style with the bare, stripped-down syntax of his later work. On the surface the poem is a simple account of an actual event, the beaching and death of a whale on Cape Cod. A re-reading reveals undercurrents of meaning, for example the subtle identification between the sounds of the whale and the language of the poet:
an eerie medley of clicks and hoots and trills, location-notes and love calls David Yezzi praises furthermore the perfect marriage of suject and form:
During the 1930s and early 1940s Kunitz, mostly in collaboration with Howard Haycraft, edited for The H.W. Wilson Company a series of biographical reference books about authors that have become standard works. Kunitz relinquished the editorship of the Wilson Library Bulletin and left the Wilson Company in 1943, when World War II interrupted his career, but co-edited three subsequent volumes in the Wilson Authors Series and acted as editorial consultant in the compilation of World Authors, 1950-1970. The dilemma which he mentions above, of how to reconcile his pacifism with his equally passionate anti-Fascism, was resolved honourably if not very happily during his three years with the Air Transport Command; he devoted himself to informational and educational duties, including the editorship of a weekly news magazine, Ten Minute Break, and was discharged in 1945 with the rank of staff sergeant. After the war, Kunitz went as professor of literature to Bennington College (1946-1949). Since then he has directed poetry workshops at the Potsdam Summer Workshop in the Creative Arts (1949-1953), at the New School for Social Research (1950-1957), and the Poetry Center in New York (1958-1962), and has taught as a visiting lecturer or professor at many other institutions. He has described his teaching philosophy in these terms:
Kunitz's Pulitzer Prize was the most important in a long list of awards including the Oscar Blumenthal Prize (1941), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1945-1946), the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship (1953-1954), the Levinson Prize (1956), the Harriet Monroe Award (1958), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1958-1959) and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959). In spite of these honours, and in spite of the admiration of such poets as Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Theodore Roethke, Kunitz remained for long, in John Ciardi's words, 'certainly the most neglected good poet of the last quarter-century'. Critics seeking to explain this neglect pointed out that he writes slowly and rejects much, that his work is condensed and tends to probe too deeply for comfort into the human psyche. Nevertheless, his reputation grew steadily, and his enormously successful reading tour of the Soviet Union in 1967 brought him a celebrity which has been increased by similar performances in the United States, sometimes in the company of the Russian poets he has befriended and translated. Following his visit to Russia in 1967, Kunitz became, in his own words 'deeply involved in the lives and fates of her poets'. Of these, the most important was Anna Akhmatova and a translation of a selection of her poems, Poems of Akhmatova, published in 1973, occupied him for years. In the same period Kunitz published The Terrible Threshold, a selection of his poems for British readers; Story Under Full Sail (1974), a translation of a dramatic poem by Andrei Voznesensky; and A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly (1975), a collection of his critical essays. Kunitz edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 1969 to 1977 and during that time served as both Consultant on Poetry and Honorary Consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress. In 1979 The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978 was published, winning the Lenore Marshall Prize for the best book of poetry published in the United States that year. The collection includes sixteen new poems, representing about a sixth of the whole, many quite different from Kunitz's earlier poetry. According to Marie Hénault (in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,Volume 480) these poems are 'unsparingly honest, most often with short lines, precise images and simple language, the whole brought to an exalted height of meaning'. The most famous example is 'The Layers', a restrained but quietly passionate recollection of a long life written in a single stanza of forty-four short lines; it begins:
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. Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985), published in Kunitz's eightieth year, contains a dozen short poems together with essays, reflections on poets and poetry and an interview reproduced from a 1982 issue of Paris Review. In the interview Kunitz says, 'I've tried to squeeze the water out of my poems' and the result is poetry even sparer and narrower on the page than that produced in his middle years. While some poems are serene and melancholy, reflecting on the 'great simplicities' in the environment of his Provincetown home, others are full of action and vivid imagery, for example, 'Raccoon Journal', a humorous celebration with a preternatural ring. A decade later, Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995) brings together most of Kunitz's best poems from the later years with several new poems that engage with abiding themes: time's legacies, nature and loss. The volume includes lyrical sketches of an instant in time -- a cross-grained knot in the opposite wall, a dragonfly or a quarrel -- and poems that witness historical misdeeds -- from the disgrace of Richard Nixon to nuclear testing. In a review of the collection in the Chicago Tribune, A.V. Christie wrote: 'A luminous and deep accounting of the times to which he belonged, Kunitz's poetry reminds us that the best art stakes its claim in crossroads territory, at the resonant intersection of the private and the public. And in these later poems we do sense a voice that has crossed from world to world.' Kunitz's more recent honours include the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Clinton in 1993; designation as State Poet of New York and Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets; and membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in New York City, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lives in New York City and Provincetown with his wife, the painter Elise Asher. The publication of Kunitz's Collected Poems in his 95th year coincided with his taking office as the United States Poet Laureate. The collection is seen as valuable, in Adam Kirsch's view (writing in the Los Angeles Times), as a living mirror of twentieth-century poetry: 'No single life encompasses more of the history of American poetry [. . .]; the poems themselves enact a long tidal movement toward and then away from Modernism, with all its proud ambiguities.' The volume is also a judicious and comprehensive survey of Kunitz's long poetic career, giving access to changes in style and sensibility over seven volumes produced between 1930 and 1995: ranging from the formal tightness of his early works, through the simplicity and direct diction of his middle years to a poignancy and lucidity in his latest volume. According to Ian Tromp (in Poetry), 'whereas the work of so many poets seems to pass a peak and then dwindle with their ageing, Kunitz continues in his nineties to write with tremendous wisdom and grace'. It is these qualities that have led critics to regard Kunitz as one of the essential poets of his generation and one who, in the view of the authoritative reference work, Contemporary Authors, has exerted a subtle but steady influence on the work of Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell. Full-length critical works include Stanley Kunitz by Marie Hénault, (1980) and Stanley Kunitz (1985) by Gregory Orr. |