Stanley Kunitz, 100; Former Poet Laureate Kept Honing His Craft at an Advanced Age

By Elaine Woo

May 16, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

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 of natural causes Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 100.

Kunitz, whose death was announced Monday 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 of the experience in his last book, “The Wild Braid,” published in 2005.

“God bless the poet who lives a century,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who called Kunitz “the poet of the human heart.”

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, although 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 recently. “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 recently 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 Massachusetts’ 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, 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 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,” poet Marie 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 New York City; 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 also was 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 8, his mother remarried. Kunitz quickly grew close to his stepfather, Mark Dine, a gentle and scholarly man who “showed me the ways of tenderness and affection.” But six years later Dine died suddenly 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 and .loved discovering words, relishing such finds as “eleemosynary” and “liquefaction” and shouting them in the woods behind his house.

“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 scholarship.

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 to teach 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 of 1927. He quit the newspaper to find a publisher for Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s letters, but failed in that mission. Nearly penniless, he landed at 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 William 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.”

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 actress Eleanor Evans, with whom he had his only child, Gretchen.

In 1943, he was drafted as a conscientious objector and spent much of his World War II service editing a weekly Army news magazine called “Ten Minute Break.”

After the war, he held a Guggenheim fellowship for a year until, at the urging of Roethke, he accepted a teaching job at Bennington College in Vermont. Over the next several decades he would teach at other campuses across 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, said 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.”

The “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 from 1974 to 1976, when the position was called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He served his second term in 2000-2001, when he was in his mid-90s.

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.

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. In 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 Geraldine R. 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.

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