Stanley Kunitz; LA Times obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
By Elaine Woo
LA Times Staff Writer
May 15, 2006
Stanley Kunitz, the elegant centenarian of American poetry,
whose musings about life, death, love and memory brought him
a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award and two terms as
U.S. poet laureate, died Sunday at his home in New York
City. He was 100.
Kunitz, whose death was announced by his publisher, W.W.
Norton, had been in failing health for some time. He came
close to death three years ago and wrote poignantly about
the experience in his last book, "The Wild Braid," published
in 2005.
Recognition came late to Kunitz, who was 54 and still
largely unknown when he won the Pulitzer for his third
volume of poetry in 1959. Eventually, critics agreed that he
was as much a master of his generation of poets as Robert
Lowell and W.H. Auden, even though he published far less-a
total of 12 volumes, the earliest of which were spaced as
much as 14 years apart.
This restraint, Kunitz often said, was the foundation of his
remarkable longevity as a poet: He was 90 when he published
his last new poem, "Touch Me," and was still writing and
giving powerful readings as he neared 100.
"I never think of myself as having outlived my useful
existence," Kunitz told the Boston Globe in 2000, when he
was 95. "I don't wake up as a nonagenarian. I wake up as a
poet. I think that's a big difference."
Age only intensified his vision.
"I know of no other poet who has written so well for so
long," Jim Haba, poetry director of the Geraldine R. Dodge
Foundation, which biennially sponsors North America's
largest poetry festival, told The Times in 2005. "Stanley is
alone in writing brilliantly into his late 80s and even into
his 90s."
Critic David Barber, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in
1996, said Kunitz not only continued to craft exquisite
poetry at an advanced age, "but has arguably saved his best
for last." In his 10th decade, Barber said, Kunitz was
"still a poet in his prime."
Kunitz was fascinated by nature's rituals of life, death and
renewal and made them themes in his writing, notably in "The
Snakes of September" and "End of Summer," two of his most
celebrated poems.
Poet Jay Parini observed last year that Kunitz's poems "are
rooted in earth, dirt and bodies. That gives his work a
sensuousness I adore."
The best illustration of the relationship Kunitz forged
between poetry and the garden is found in the lush plot he
cultivated in front of his longtime summer home on Cape Cod.
A former sand dune was transformed over a period of years
into a fertile, terraced haven that Kunitz designed like a
poem.
Each terrace represents a stanza, repetitions of color or
form provide unity, contrasting foliage creates tension, and
winding paths encourage immersion and discovery, the same
experiences that the poet wished for his readers.
A guiding spirit to several generations of poets, including
Marie Howe and former Poet Laureate Louise Gluck, Kunitz was
a co-founder of Poets House, a 20-year-old poetry library in
New York City, whose 40,000 volumes constitute one of the
nation's largest public collections. He also helped
establish the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.,
which since 1968 has supported more than 500 emerging
writers and artists through housing and stipends.
Other poets depended on Kunitz as a rare symbol of health
and endurance in an art dominated by personalities not known
for either. John Berryman and Anne Sexton committed suicide
before they were 60, Sylvia Plath at 30. Theodore Roethke,
Kunitz's close friend, suffered recurring bouts of
depression before succumbing to a heart attack at 55.
Kunitz did not go mad, die young or yield to other forms of
dissipation, despite tragedies in his early life. For years
he made his living editing reference books and teaching at
universities. At night he holed up in a spartan writing room
where he read, wrote and rewrote until dawn.
"Stanley has managed to do what many of us fear is
impossible," Howe once wrote. "He is a poet and he is sane."
He loved to cook for friends and in his late 90s was still
preparing all the meals for himself and his wife, Elise
Asher, a painter and poet, who died in 2004 at age 92. They
were married for 46 years.
Thrice married, he is survived by a daughter, Dr. Gretchen
Kunitz, of Orinda, Calif.; a stepdaughter, Dr. Babette
Becker, of Manhattan; five grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren.
One of three children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants,
Kunitz began life in Worcester, Mass., in a household
stricken with grief. His father, Solomon, killed himself a
few weeks before Kunitz's birth on July 19, 1905 by
swallowing carbolic acid in a public park. Shrouded in
sorrow, Kunitz's birthday was never celebrated when he was
young, and he would have nightmares about the father he
never knew. Years later, he would explain that the reason he
stayed up all night writing was to avoid sleep, which he
associated with dying.
Kunitz and his two older sisters were raised by his mother,
Yetta, who had run a dressmaking company with her husband
that went bankrupt. A strong-willed Lithuanian immigrant,
she opened a dry goods store and eventually another garment
factory that prospered and allowed her to pay off the
family's debts.
"She must have been one of the first women to run a
large-scale business in this country," Kunitz wrote in his
1985 book, "Next-to-Last Things." She was also a committed
leftist whose politics made an impression on her son: He
would visit Russia as an adult and publish notable
translations of the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Andrei
Voznesensky.
Although he admired his mother and never doubted that she
loved him, she spent little time at home and was emotionally
inaccessible. She never spoke of his father and, as he wrote
in "The Portrait," did not tolerate reminders of him:
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
When he was eight, his mother remarried. Kunitz quickly grew
close to his new stepfather, Mark Dine, a gentle and
scholarly man who "showed me the ways of tenderness and
affection." But six years later Dine died of a heart attack
and Kunitz was desolated.
The lost father would become a recurring theme in his work.
"I think that was central - that sense of loss, that sense
of yearning," he once told an interviewer. "You know Henry
James' wonderful phrase: 'The port from which I set out was
the port of my loneliness.' "
He found comfort in books. He loved discovering words,
relishing such finds as "eleemosynary" and "liquefaction"
and shouting them in the woods behind his house. He so loved
the sound of words that he sometimes used them without
regard to meaning. "George Washington is a tall, petite,
handsome man," he wrote in a long-ago school essay that
delighted his teacher so much that she read it to students
every year.
"I think every poet begins by simply being enchanted by the
sound of words," he told the New York Times a few years ago.
After Worcester's Classical High School, Kunitz attended
Harvard University on a scholarship, where he studied under
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He won Harvard's Lloyd
McKim Garrison Medal for Poetry, graduated summa cum laude
in English and philosophy in 1926, and obtained a master's
degree in English with a thesis on modernist poets in 1927.
Given his record of achievement, he planned to study for his
doctorate and teach at Harvard, but no offer materialized.
When he asked why, an advisor told him that Anglo-Saxon
students would resent being taught by a Jew. This
revelation, Kunitz recalled many years later, "broke my
heart." He shunned academia for the next two decades.
He briefly wrote for the Worcester Telegram, where his
assignments included a story on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial in
1927. He quit the newspaper to find a publisher for
Bartolomeo Vanzetti's letters, but failed in that mission.
Nearly penniless, he landed at the H.W. Wilson Co., which
hired him to edit the journal for librarians that was later
called the Wilson Library Bulletin. He eventually edited
literary reference books, including "Living Authors" (1931),
"The Junior Book of Authors" (1934) and "Twentieth Century
Authors" (1942).
He married his first wife, poet Helen Pearce, in 1930, the
same year Doubleday poetry editor Ogden Nash accepted his
first collection of poems. Called "Intellectual Things," it
showed the influence of Blake and the metaphysical poets.
The eminent critic William Rose Benet raved about Kunitz in
the Saturday Review: "Here is a man immediately asserting
his own fresh utterance, modern and yet very old, intricate
and metaphysical and yet undeniably full of the sagacity of
the true seer, the poet born."
Kunitz and Pearce moved to a dilapidated hundred-acre farm
in Connecticut. When it was destroyed by a tornado, they
bought another farm in Pennsylvania, where he continued to
write and edit.
Fourteen years would pass before his second volume of
poetry, "Passport to the War," was published, to warm
reviews. During that time, his marriage to Pearce ended in
1937. Two years later, he married an actress named Eleanor
Evans, with whom he had his only child, Gretchen.
In 1943, he was drafted as a conscientious objector, a
declaration that landed him latrine duty. He later managed
to earn a different assignment and spent the rest of his
World War II service editing a weekly Army news magazine,
"Ten Minute Break."
After the war, he held a Guggenheim fellowship for a year
until, at the urging of Roethke, whom he had met in 1935, he
accepted a teaching job at Bennington College in Vermont.
Over the next several decades he would teach at other
campuses around the country, staying the longest - 1963 to
1985 - at Columbia University.
He published his third book of poems after another 14-year
interval, in 1958, the year his marriage to Evans dissolved
and he married Asher. "Selected Poems" was rejected by eight
publishers before it was finally accepted by Atlantic,
Little, Brown.
A large collection with 85 poems, it won high praise from
distinguished critics, such as Saturday Review's John
Ciardi, who called Kunitz "certainly the most neglected good
poet of the last quarter-century."
Similarly, Robert Lowell, writing in the New York Times Book
Review, noted that Kunitz had been "one of the masters for
years, and yet so unrecognized that his 'Selected Poems'
make him the poet of the hour."
In 1959, the "poet of the hour" earned the Pulitzer Prize,
an award that gave Kunitz the confidence to continue
writing. It did not, however, speed his output. His fourth
volume, "The Testing-Tree," appeared 13 years after
"Selected Poems," in 1971. It marked a departure from the
rather dense, formal lyricism and highly intellectualized
approach of his first book to looser, sparer, more
prose-like forms. His poems also became more personal, such
as in "The Portrait" and "Journal for My Daughter," the
latter a profession of love and apology addressed to the
daughter he had all but abandoned during her girlhood ("You
say you had a father once; his name was absence " ).
Some critics opined that Kunitz had joined the
"confessional" poets, a group that included Lowell, Sexton
and Plath. Kunitz loathed the term, explaining that he was
not motivated by a need to "tell all," but by a desire to
turn his life into legend or myth, a critical difference in
his view.
Confessional or not, Kunitz was now entering his richest
phase. Most of his best work, critics said, came after "The
Testing-Tree," in such volumes as "The Poems of Stanley
Kunitz, 1928-1978" (1979), which included "The Layers," a
valedictory written in his 80s about outliving many of the
people most dear to him, and "Passing Through: The Later
Poems," which won the National Book Award in 1995. Barber,
in the Atlantic Monthly, called the latter collection "a
book of revelations."
"[T]he Kunitz of the past 40 years," Barber wrote, "has been
a measurably finer poet than he was in the first half of his
life, amassing a body of such starkly powerful lyric poems
as to make all that came before them seem an extended
apprenticeship. They are, in all their outward simplicity
and inward mystery, perhaps the closest that American poetry
has come in our time to achieving an urgency and aura that
deserve - even demand - to be called visionary."
Kunitz also won the Bollingen Prize, the Robert Frost Medal,
the Brandeis Medal of Achievement and a National Medal of
Arts. He served his first term as poet laureate in 1974-76,
when the position was called "consultant in poetry to the
Library of Congress."
He did not so much write poems as recite them as they formed
in his mind. Then he set them down on yellow lined paper
using an old manual typewriter, commonly tearing up 50 to 75
sheets before he gained the "feeling that I'm really on my
way" to producing a poem, he said.
He tore up poems he didn't like as ruthlessly as he removed
garden plants that did not thrive. "One gets rid of the
failures," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, explaining
that he did not want any bad poems to linger in published
posterity "after I'm not around to check them."
He brooded over poems for years before allowing them to see
print. The gestation period for "Halley's Comet," for
example, was 80 years.
He said such scrupulous restraint was the reason his
creative impulse endured.
"I think I conditioned myself not for the sprints, but for
the marathon," he told the New York Times in 1995. "I've not
expended all of my energy in topical poems, or occasional
poetry. I fact, I've not written at all unless I felt
compelled to write."
He acknowledged, however, that writing poetry grew harder
with age. "The poems are there," he told the Boston Globe in
2000, "but they lie under the debris of the life. One has to
dig for them very much harder than one had to at the
beginning, when poetry is so largely, in one's youth, a
glandular activity."
His publishers had such faith in his productivity that they
gave him a three-year contract when he was 85. When he was
95, he stood before a crowd of thousands at the Dodge Poetry
Festival in Waterloo Village, N.J., and read his poems in a
strong, rhythmic voice for 50 minutes. After a two-minute
standing ovation, he signed books and shook hands for an
hour.
In spring 2003, he was hospitalized in weak condition. At
home a few days later, he began to show many of the physical
signs of dying. Friends, believing this to be the end, came
to his bed to say goodbye.
Then, on the third day at home, the frail poet opened wide
his large, hazel eyes and emerged from what he later called
"the other world." He warned that he wasn't done with his
life yet, that he had plans to write not only a book - "The
Wild Braid" - but a hundred new poems. He said he was sure
that the first of those poems would address his encounter
with "the Dark Angel" of death.
He remained a working poet even in the throes of death.
Genine Lentine, his collaborator on "The Wild Braid,"
describes his fragile state in that book. He was drifting in
and out of consciousness. At one point, Lentine recounts
guiding him on an imaginary walk through his beloved garden,
and he visualized the raccoons and birds and new plants
breaking through the ground. "All is stirring," he said.
"Hope is stirring."
Then he grew quiet, an expression of concentration on his
face. When Lentine asked what he was doing, he told her that
he was composing "a poem that says goodbye."
But he saved his goodbye for another day.
What kept him going, he often said, was his love of life,
"the greatest gift I can think of."
He expressed this love in his late poem "The Long Boat," in
which he imagined waving to his loved ones on shore as he
drifted away:
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
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.