I lived from 1905-2006.
I was from the United States, and am in the Americas category.
Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1907. He studied at Harvard College, receiving a BA in 1926 and an MA in 1927. He then moved to New York, taking a job with the H. W. Wilson company as an editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin; he also began at this time the work of collaboration with Howard Haycraft on four important biographical dictionaries of English and American authors.
Read full description by GypsyDreamer, OldPoetry Team...
His first book of poems, Intellectual Things (1930) was barely recognized, and Kunitz did not publish his second book, Passport to War, for another fourteen years. The Second World War interrupted his career as editor, and when he was released from the army he joined the faculty of Bennington College, the first of several academic jobs. Real recognition came slowly to Kunitz, culminating in his receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 for his first Selected Poems.
His many books of poetry include:
The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton, 2000)
Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995),
Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985)
Passport to the War (1944)
The Testing-Tree (1971)
Intellectual Things (1930)
His honors include the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Harvard's Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Medal of the Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He served for two years as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, was designated State Poet of New York, and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. In 2000 he was named United States Poet Laureate. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He lives in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Bibliographary and picture source: Academy of American Poets
Popular poetry
Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
48 lines, 1 comment
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
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Now in the suburbs and the falling light
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Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
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Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
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All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
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1
On my way home from school
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I have walked through many lives,
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At his incipient sun
The ice of twenty winters broke,
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If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
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