Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz, American poet, died on May 14th 2006, aged 100

IN A very long life, Stanley Kunitz did not seem to move around much. Apart from a spell in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and a lecture tour of the Soviet Union in 1967, he spent almost all his days in New York or New England, and most of those in Massachusetts. A line drawn through Worcester, Cambridge and Provincetown, in Cape Cod, where he grew roses in the Atlantic blasts, could neatly contain his world.

Yet Mr Kunitz was a poet, one of America’s best of the past century, and therefore travelled incessantly. Much of the time he was on the sea, voyaging to the ends of the earth. In imagination he “strode years; stretched into bird;/ Raced though the sleeping country where I was young.” He could sink deep into his own mind, through gorges and ravines, “from the known to the unknown to the unknowable”. Or he could coil through life like a fish in a river.

If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

This transformation happened as he read about the Pacific salmon in Time. The words began to flow, and he followed them. His sense of poetry-making – and few could explain so well the mysteries of it – was an almost animal instinct. As soon as he could feel his own “interior rhythm” in what he observed, whether slithering fish or falling leaf, he knew the poem would work.

His own rhythm took time to discover. Robert Herrick’s songs, recited unexpectedly by a teacher at high school, first drew him into poetry; but it was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”, pulled down by chance from a shelf in a Harvard library, that showed Mr Kunitz the scope of what he could write. Over the years he moved from Elizabethan high style to simple, almost conversational free verse, “wringing out the water”, as he put it, and aiming for a poetry that was natural, luminous, deep and spare.

That was difficult, because Mr Kunitz felt his human heaviness so intensely. When a whale beached itself at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, he made it a metaphor of himself, “crushed by your own weight,/ collapsing into yourself ... disgraced and mortal.” In his first collection, “Intellectual Things” (1930), he dreamed of stripping “The tender blanket from my bone” and rising “like a skeleton in the sun”, but did not have much faith he would.

Nor, despite Hopkins, did he write about God. The “Father” he invoked in his poems was his own, who had killed himself before he was born. He had drunk carbolic acid in a park in Worcester, leaving Stanley’s mother to support her children by dressmaking. Mr Kunitz followed this ghost obsessively: across the bloody grass, through plum orchards, to the edge of a river, where

Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me

The white ignorant hollow of his face.

He wrote frequently of family, but almost never of his Jewishness. When rebuked for that, Mr Kunitz, who had been barred as a Jew from teaching at Harvard in 1927, made a sharp reply: “I am an American free-thinker, a damn stubborn one, and my poetry is not hyphenated.” His rebelliousness showed again when he insisted on being a conscientious objector during the second world war; it showed, too, in his refusal to write fashionable stuff. To be a metaphysical poet entranced with nature, rather than a cynical observer of men and cities, was the wrong flavour for the mid-20th century. Mr Kunitz paid for his contrarian streak by being dismissed as too abstract and ignored by the critics. Had Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell not befriended him, he might have stayed as sunk in pastoral obscurity as John Clare, and perhaps as mad.

Loneliness seemed engrained in him. Out of school, his childhood was spent by himself in the woods throwing stones at a tree (two hits, he would be a poet), or testing how far he could climb up a perpendicular cliff. Later in life he kept the usual poet’s habits, shut up by himself, writing in scrupulously neat longhand with no deletions. Every decade or so, a book of poems would appear. Very gradually, out of this slim oeuvre, a reputation grew and prizes came. In 2000, at the age of 95, he was made poet

laureate of the United States.

Yet the lonely, searching poet could also be almost gregarious. He loved teaching, at Bennington, Yale and elsewhere, persuading his students, he said once, that every one of them could be a poet. He set up two centres, in Provincetown and New York, where writers could live and work in company with other artists, discussing their explorations.

As for his own endless travelling, each poem hinted at an end to it. “I have the sense”, he said, “of swimming underwater towards some kind of light and open air that will be saving.” Or,

Becoming, never being, till

Becoming is a being still.