About Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz was one of the most acclaimed and durable american poets author of 12 poetry collections. 'Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul', he wrote. He has been appointed Poet Laureate to the American Library of Congress in 2000. His first book of poems, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930. His second volume of poems, Passport to the War, was published fourteen years later - the book went largely unnoticed, although it featured some of Kunitz's best poems, and soon fell out of print. Kunitz's confidence was not in the best of shape when, in 1959, he had trouble finding a publisher for his third book, Selected Poems: 1928-1958. Despite this unflattering experience, the book, eventually published by Little Brown, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He dies at 100 in 2006. During the next years and from 1970-80, he became one of the most treasured and distinctive poetry voices in the United States. His collection Passing Through: The Later Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995. Kunitz received many other honors, including a National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for a lifetime achievement in poetry, the Robert Frost Medal, and Harvard's Centennial Medal.Browse all poems and texts published on Stanley Kunitz
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
