Stanley Kunitz, 100, was Pulitzer winner and U.S. poet laureate
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, May 16, 2006
NEW YORK – Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner whose expressive verse, social commitment and generosity to young writers spanned three-quarters of a century, has died. He was 100.
He died in his sleep early Sunday at his home in Manhattan, said his publisher, W.W. Norton.
Kunitz had just turned 95 when he was appointed poet laureate in 2000, capping a career that began 70 years earlier with the collection “Intellectual Things” and later included a Pulitzer, a National Medal of the Arts and – when he was 90 – a National Book Award.
He served a single one-year term as U.S. poet laureate and also was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the precursor to poet laureate, from 1974 to 1976.
His poems included tributes to nature and wildlife, such as “The Snakes of September”; the traumatic memories of “The Portrait,” in which he recalled his father’s suicide; and the spiritual journey of “The Long Boat,” with his wish “To be rocked by the Infinite!/as if it didn’t matter which way was home.”
His early work was more formal, more dependent on rhyme and meter, but he anticipated his own evolution in the poem “Change,” with its promise of “Becoming, never being.” Over time, his verse simplified and crystallized, with Kunitz once observing that he had learned to “strip the water out of my poems.”
