Kunitz, Stanley (1905-2006), an American poet, served as poet laureate of the United States in 2000 and 2001. Kunitz won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Selected Poems 1928-1958 (published in 1958). The volume includes most of his first two volumes of verse, Intellectual Things (1930) and Passport to the War (1944). These poems gained recognition for their strong intellectual quality, reflecting Kunitz’s admiration for such poets as John Donne and William Blake. Many of Kunitz’s poems concern the interrelationship between life and death.
Kunitz’s later poetry revealed a more personal, informal style. In the autobiographical volume of poems The Testing-Tree (1971), Kunitz explored his feelings about his father’s suicide, which occurred before the poet was born, and analyzed the generation gap between himself and his daughter. Kunitz’s other collections include The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928-1978 (1979), Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985), and Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995). Kunitz also edited literary reference books and translated modern Russian poetry into English.
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 29, 1905. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University in 1926 and 1927. Kunitz spent much of his career teaching. He was a lecturer and professor at Columbia University from 1963 to 1985. He died on May 14, 2006, at the age of 100.
