Stanley Kunitz: Stanley Kunitz, who was 100, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of far-ranging style and influence and US poet laureate twice.
In about a dozen books, Kunitz's literary approach veered over the decades from metaphysical sonnets about love and loss to stark ruminations on his father's suicide. Gradually, he learned to "strip the water out of my poems" and acknowledge the benefits of a simpler, more intense approach.
Thematically, he spoke of rebirths and questing. He was fascinated by the ongoing tussle between life and death. "The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue," he once said. "It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry."
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 29th, 1905. His father, a dress manufacturer whose business went bankrupt, committed suicide by swallowing carbolic acid in a public park. Later, his stepfather died prematurely, from a heart attack.
His mother, a Lithuanian immigrant, opened a shop to support her son and his two toddler sisters.
From high school Kunitz won a scholarship to Harvard University. He received a master's degree in English in 1927 and wanted to stay on as a professorial assistant. He was told that Jews were unwelcome, lest they make white Anglo-Saxon students feel inferior.
He took a reporting job on the Worcester Telegram, and in 1930 his first book, Intellectual Things, was accepted by a young Doubleday editor named Ogden Nash who marked Kunitz for promise. Kunitz took the title from a William Blake line ("For a tear is an intellectual thing"), and his homage to Blake, John Donne and other English metaphysical poets made him distinct from more-lyrical American contemporaries.
Kunitz remained obscure to the general public even as he won occasional awards from poetry magazines. He found work in New York for the HW Wilson publishing company, editing biographical reference books.
A pacifist, and in his late 30s, he was drafted by the army during the second World War. He dug latrines on a mostly black base in North Carolina. Aghast that so many fellow soldiers couldn't say why they were fighting, he rethought his politics and started a magazine to explain it all. He said he "realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over".
He later voiced contempt for the Vietnam War, US support for right-leaning juntas in Central America and the US-led war against Iraq. "The poet can't change anything," he said, "but the poet can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience."
After his military discharge, he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for creative writing and began a succession of teaching duties at colleges throughout the northeast. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia University from 1967 to 1985. He also was a founder of Poets House, a New York-based poetry library.
His reputation was dramatically enhanced when he received the Pulitzer for Selected Poems: 1928-1958 (1958), a volume he said three publishers initially refused to read and five more rejected.
Thirteen years passed before his next book, The Testing-Tree (1971), which focused on his feelings toward his father.
From 1974 to 1976, Kunitz was the Library of Congress's consultant on poetry, the precursor title to poet laureate. In 2000, he succeeded Robert Pinsky and became the 10th poet laureate of the United States.
Kunitz was regarded as a mentor to many poets, including two future poet laureates, Louise Gluck and Robert Hass, as well as Sylvia Plath.
His collection Passing Through (1995) won a National Book Award. In his 100th year, he published The Wild Braid, a collection of poems, photographs and ruminations on gardening, about which he was passionate.
His marriages to poet Helen Pearce Kunitz and actress Eleanor Evans Kunitz ended in bitter divorces. For many years, he was an absentee father to the daughter he had with his second wife. He said his writing complicated his relationships.
His third wife, painter and poet Elise Asher, whom he married in 1958, died in 2004. She illustrated some of her husband's books.
Stanley Kunitz: born July 29th, 1905; died May 14th, 2006.