Stanley Kunitz, twice Poet Laureate of the United States
Worcester, Massachusetts: 1905
Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on July 29, 1905. Six weeks before his birth, his father, a dressmaker who had gone bankrupt, committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid in Elm Park. His mother removed every trace of Stanley's father from the household.
This absence would haunt Kunitz throughout his life and shape much of his poetry. He wrote about it directly in poems like "The Portrait," where he describes his mother ripping up his father's picture and slapping him: "In my sixty-fourth year / I can feel my cheek / still burning."
Harvard and Antisemitism
Kunitz graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1926 with an English major and philosophy minor, then earned his master's degree in English the following year. He wanted to continue his studies for a doctorate degree, but was told by the university that Anglo-Saxon students would not like to be taught by a Jew.
After being denied the teaching opportunity, Kunitz dropped out of the doctoral program and began working as a reporter and editor. This forced him to take an alternate career path until he eventually secured a teaching position at Bennington College in his 40s.
First Book at 25
Kunitz published his first book, "Intellectual Things," in 1930 at age 25. The epigraph read "For the tear is an intellectual thing." This combination of heart and intellect would define his work for the next 75 years.
His second volume, "Passport to the War," was published fourteen years later in 1944 and went largely unnoticed. For decades, Kunitz's confidence wavered. In 1959, he had trouble finding a publisher for his third book, "Selected Poems: 1928-1958."
Despite this difficult start, the book eventually published by Little Brown received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
War, Teaching, and Transformation
During World War II, Kunitz was drafted into the Army in 1943 as a conscientious objector. He served as a noncombatant, refused a commission, and was discharged as a staff sergeant.
After the war, he began a peripatetic teaching career that would span four decades, teaching at Bennington College, Columbia University, Yale, Princeton, Vassar, and many other institutions. From 1967 to 1985, he taught in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.
Kunitz mentored countless young poets and was known as "a surrogate father of poets" by The Washington Post.
A Radical Transformation
When "The Testing-Tree" appeared in 1971, twelve years after his Pulitzer Prize, Kunitz's style had radically transformed. Gone were the highly intellectual and philosophical musings of his earlier work. In their place were deeply personal yet disciplined narratives. His lines shifted from iambic pentameter to a freer prosody based on instinct and breath.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
Poet Laureate at 69 and 95
Stanley Kunitz was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice: first in 1974 at age 69, when the position was called Consultant in Poetry, and again in 2000 at age 95, making him the oldest person to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, he became one of the most treasured and distinctive voices in American poetry. His collection "Passing Through: The Later Poems" won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1993 from President Clinton, the Bollingen Prize in 1987, and the Robert Frost Medal in 1998.
Building Community
Kunitz founded the Poets House, a literary center and poetry archive in New York City, and the Fine Arts Work Center, a long-term artists' residency program in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He believed in creating spaces where poets could gather, learn, and grow.
Grace Cavalieri, producer of "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress," said: "Stanley Kunitz changed our understanding about poetry by the risk and courage he displayed in combining the heart and the intellect. This influence goes beyond the page. It's a spiritual leadership that has changed America's conversation about poetry forever."
The Garden and the Page
For most of his life, Kunitz divided his time between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was a passionate gardener and maintained one of the most impressive seaside gardens in Provincetown. Gardening was not separate from his poetry—it was another way of living in transformation.
In 2005, at age 100, he published his 11th book: "The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden," a mix of prose, poetry, conversation, and photographs. The book was both a celebration of a life well-lived and a meditation on mortality, growth, and the cycles of nature. He remained a remarkable gardner and his versifying never failed him.
Three Marriages, One Love Story
Kunitz's first two marriages—to poet Helen Pearce Kunitz and actress Eleanor Evans Kunitz—ended in divorce. He married his third wife, painter and poet Elise Asher, in 1958. They were together for 46 years until her death in 2004, just two years before his own passing.
His marriage to Asher led to deep friendships with artists like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, enriching his creative life and connecting the worlds of poetry and visual art.
Born 1905 • Died May 14, 2006, Manhattan, New York
Stanley Kunitz died at his home in Manhattan on May 14, 2006, at age 100. He had lived through the entire 20th century and into the 21st, publishing poetry across eight decades.
He left behind a daughter from his second marriage, Dr. Gretchen Kunitz; a stepdaughter, Dr. Babette Becker; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. More significantly, he left behind generations of poets he had mentored and a body of work that continues to transform readers.
Jennifer Rutland of the Library's Poetry and Literature Center remembered: "Whenever I was around Stanley, it was as though the air was infused with his huge spirit. He had a great peaceful center, and was able to infect others with his passionate investment in our world, our imaginations and dreams, our lives and history."
His Legacy
Stanley Kunitz lived 100 years and never stopped changing. From the young man haunted by his father's suicide to the elder statesman of American poetry, he embodied his own philosophy: "I am not done with my changes."
His influence on American poetry is immeasurable. He mentored poets including James Wright, Mark Doty, Louise Glück, and Carolyn Kizer. He founded institutions that continue to support poets. He wrote poems that combine intellectual rigor with emotional honesty, showing that the two are not opposites but partners.
Perhaps most importantly, he lived his own advice: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." He understood that a life is built through accumulation and transformation, that we carry all our past selves with us even as we continue to change.
At his centenary, still writing and publishing, still tending his garden, still mentoring young poets, Stanley Kunitz proved that creativity has no expiration date. Every stone on the road was precious to him. And he was not done with his changes.
