Conversations with Stanley Kunitz

Pulitzer Prize Poet Stanley Kunitz Started Career in Worcester

Margaret Parsons / 1960

From the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (12 June 1960). © 1960 TELEGRAM & GAZETTE. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Stanley Kunitz, a native of Worcester, was mentioned as the most underrated poet of today in a special supplement of the London Times on The American Imagination, published November 8, 1959, this in spite of the fact that he had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems, as the best book of poetry published in 1958. He was described as the poet’s poet in an article on A Vocal Group, the Jewish Part of American Letters.

Last year he won the Ford grant as one of the ten American writers whom the Ford Foundation is subsidizing for two years, that they may devote their time and energy to writing.

He returned to his New York home from Boston, where the previous college year he had been on the faculty of Brandeis University.

Among his many awards is the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, which he received in 1953. He was enabled thereby to spend the next year in Europe.

Kunitz was born in Worcester and lived on Providence Street until he graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude in 1926 and he has taken a master’s degree, also from Harvard, in 1927.

His early education was in the Worcester public schools and he was valedictorian in his class at Classical High School, from which he graduated in 1922. While there he edited the school magazine, played on the tennis team, and won several debating prizes. He won a scholarship from Harvard, was named to Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society for scholastic achievement.

While he was at college, he had been working during the summer vacations as reporter on the Worcester Telegram. After receiving his master’s degree in 1927, he was a staff writer for the Telegram until early 1928, when he went to New York. He wanted to be a writer and decided to try to get into the publishing world.

Not even when he was teaching at nearby Brandeis did he come back, though, as he was driving about the countryside, the signposts beckoned him to Worcester.

We have been following his career with interest for the thirty-one years we have been editing the Sunday Telegram Book Page, carrying reviews of all his books and noting his rising success and recognition in the Evening Gazette Book Chat. We had corresponded but had never met. So we called him last spring at Brandeis, but just missed him. Barely had the students registered last fall when we were on his trail again, only to learn that he was still in New York, by virtue of the Ford grant.

So we wrote to New York and made plans to see him there during National Book Awards, on which he was a judge. He is one of the distinguished Worcester authors—along with S. N. Behrman, Esther Forbes, and the late Bob Benchley—and we want to introduce him to Worcester people, many of whom know him only by his poetry.

We found him at his home on West Twelfth Street, near Seventh Avenue in what is loosely termed Greenwich Village. It is one of a block of brick houses built in the 1880s, with large rooms and high ceilings, which give a pleasant air of spaciousness, after one has been visiting the more compact modern New York apartments.

Our eye was attracted at once by the many paintings of such variety as to suggest different artists. So we were not surprised, on meeting his wife, to learn that she is an artist and poet, Elise Asher. Some of the paintings are by her and some by friends with whom she has swapped. They have been married three years. She has a daughter by a previous marriage, and so has the poet, whose daughter is now in California.

The house is large enough to provide a studio for her, a study for him. From the back windows in his study on the second floor we see the outline of his garden, in which he takes particular delight. From the window we noticed the entrance with a bas-relief sculptured head on the wall and the shape of the oblong garden beyond, spacious for the heart of New York. Making things grow and playing tennis are two things Kunitz likes best to do.

Conversation naturally started with Worcester. We had to tell Kunitz about the wholesale destruction of Providence Hill, where his old home was, and we broke the big news that it looks like we were really going to have a new public library. Of his fellow workers on the Telegram, there aren’t many left now.

He spoke of his interest in Sam Behrman’s book, The Worcester Account, and said life on Providence Hill described by Behrman was entirely different from what he knew a half a generation later. The picturesqueness and the foreign flavor of the transported people keeping their old language and their old customs had yielded to the Americanization process of ironing out the differences between the old settlers and new neighbors.

When Kunitz left for New York and its publishing world, he had behind him the practical experience of his newspaper work here and training in writing under Copey (Charles Townsend Copeland) and other Harvard professors.

We came across a story told by Kunitz in Copey at Harvard, a new book by J. Donald Adams. Kunitz recalls the time when he was taking Copey’s advanced course, English 12: "I was much involved in the world of private fantasy and my stories were written in a high-flown style with which Copey could have little sympathy. As I look back now, I see how patient he was with me when I resisted his efforts to pull me down to earth.

"My pride was hurt by his criticism; but just then when I was prepared to yield to utter dejection, he would permit himself to cluck approvingly at the appropriate places in my manuscript. ‘Write out of what you know,’ is the admonition that sticks in my mind.

"We were not easy with each other in these intimate conferences—some of my classmates were much closer to him—but in the end he gave me an ‘A’ with his blessing and with a gift to boot, The Art of Thought by Graham Wallas. The volume, in which he inscribed an unexpected compliment, is still in my possession.

Perhaps I owe a great debt to a less famous teacher Robert Gay of Simmons College, who (if memory serves me right) substituted for Copey the following year, with the title of visiting professor. It was he who returned a manuscript of mine with the comment ‘You are a poet—why don’t you write poems?’ I did thereafter.

But one doesn’t make a living writing poems, as Kunitz explained to me, years after the incident above took place. At fifty cents a line, which he says is a good rate for poetry, the poet who sold a thousand lines a year would make five hundred dollars.

His apprenticeship in the publishing world was on the staff of the H. W. Wilson Co. of New York, where he began to write sketches for the excellent series of biographical dictionaries of modern literature, which have been coming out ever since Living Authors, the first, edited by Dilly Tante. (Kunitz wished in those early days to make his name known by more original work.) Perhaps their enthusiastic reception induced him to use his own name on the many succeeding volumes.

We are glad that the increasing time he gives to poetry has not entirely diverted him from these indispensable books of reference (in the eyes of a book reviewer). He is now at work on one of even larger scope, treating the lives and works of many different authors of many different lands and going back to past literary history.

By the way when he first went to New York seeking a start to his literary career, he carried with him the makings of a manuscript which he thought would be eagerly received by the publishers. He had covered phases of the Sacco-Vanzetti case for the Telegram and had been given Vanzetti’s letters to his mother to edit or dispose of. But not a publisher was to be found who would touch them. (Like many, he felt the defendants had not had a fair trial. Furthermore, he believed them innocent—a subject on which there is still a division of opinion.)

It was then that he sought and secured a job with Wilson and was the founder of the Wilson Library Bulletin, which is still going and is considered the most successful library bulletin in the world. He was then living in Mansfield, Connecticut. His first volume of poetry, Intellectual Things, was published in 1930 and got a very nice reception.

Came the second World War, and he entered the army as a private, became staff sergeant and was in the information and education division in Washington. He edited a weekly magazine, Ten-Minute Break. On leaving the army in 1945, he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to New Mexico, where he lived in an abandoned Pullman car on the Santa Fe ranch of the Ernest Thompson Seton.

Suddenly out of nowhere came an invitation to become a teacher at Bennington College where he had once given a poetry reading. Feeling that he had learned what he needed of the publishing business, he accepted, although the pay was much less. He has never regretted the change. After being at Bennington for three years, he taught at the University of Washington.

Mainly he taught poetry and conducted poetry workshops, so that today he finds a substantial percentage of young poets are his former students. In nearly every magazine using poetry or in collections of the work of young poets, he finds names of his former students cropping up.

He is also active in conducting poetry readings at the YMHA and other New York centers. A brochure on the Kunitz poetry has recently appeared in the Yale Series of Recorded Poets, edited by Louis Martz, chairman of the Yale English Department where Kunitz has recorded his own works.

We were interested in hearing his opinion of the state of poetry today.

The best modern poetry is complex, he explained, because it is dealing with the manifold tissues of experience. This problem of the obscurity of modern poetry is not the responsibility of the poet, but of the reader. It is an encouraging symptom that more interest is shown in poetry than ever before, partly because of the readings in poetry centers throughout the country, partly because of recorded poems. The vogue of reading started with Thomas at the YMHA in nonsectarian meetings, freely and generously devoted to the arts themselves without any kind of dogma.

We were interested to hear his high opinion of the poetry readings of the YMHA, because we attended the first reading by Dylan Thomas when, as Kunitz says, Dylan Thomas taught the audience that you didn’t have to understand all the poems said, for the music of language is an intrinsic point.

Kunitz gave a very hopeful picture for poetry in a recent article in Harper’s: This happens not to be a time a great innovation in poetic technique; it is rather a period in which the technical gains of past decades, particularly the 1920s, are being tested and consolidated.

Despite all the lamentations about the state of poetry in America today, the general level of quality, I dare say, is higher than it has ever been in our literary history. It isn’t a Golden Age for several obvious reasons, including the absence of one or two monumental geniuses in their prime to concentrate the poetic energies of the age; but it may well be a Silver Age … My guess is—my wild guess, if you will—that only the Elizabethans will make a better showing.

He is referring here especially to the Elizabethan lyrics. He is himself engaged this year in writing a long narrative poem.

When we saw Kunitz in New York, he was just back from Washington, where he had given a poetry reading under the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Fund, which takes us back to Worcester. Mrs. Whittall, formerly of Worcester, was present and took great pleasure in hearing the young poet (as she called him in a whisper to her companion overheard by Kunitz). We wonder if she realized that he came from the city where for so many years she had made her home.

Communication and Communion: A Dialogue between Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate

Allen Tate / 1966

Used by permission of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org, all rights reserved.

In the spring of 1966, because poets were persistently complaining that poetry was badly taught, the Academy of American Poets and Stanley Kunitz organized, in conjunction with the New York City Board of Education, a series of weekly dialogues between Mr. Kunitz and twelve American poets as an accredited course for high school teachers. This course was preparatory to the inception of the now nationally renowned Poetry-in-the-Schools program, which began the following year in New York City under the direction of Elizabeth Kray, who was then executive director of the academy. Among those who participated in this series of dialogues were: W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, William Meredith, Howard Nemerov, Henry Rago, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. The tapes of this entire series, which have only recently been transcribed, are now housed at the Poetry Room of Harvard University along with the academy’s complete archive of recorded poets. This conversation with Allen Tate took place on March 30, 1966.

Kunitz: I can think of no better way of introducing Mr. Allen Tate than by reading a paragraph from an essay of his entitled The Man of Letters in the Modern World:

A man of letters has, then, in our time a small but critical service to render to man: a service that will be in the future more effective than it is now, when the cult of the literary man shall have ceased to be an idolatry. Men of letters and their followers, like the parvenu gods and their votaries of decaying Rome, compete in the dissemination of distraction and novelty. But the true province of a man of letters is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself. The state is the mere operation of society, but culture is the way society lives, the material medium through which men receive the one lost truth of what Jacques Maritain calls the supra-temporal destiny of man. It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the culture of language, to which the rest of culture is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The end of social man is communion in time through love, which is beyond time. [Tate, Allen, The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays, Chicago: Regnery, 1953, 9.]

Tate: I don’t know what I’m supposed to say now. I wrote those words a long time ago, and I am rather astounded at the rhetoric of the passage. It seems a little high-flown, but I think I still believe what I said insofar as I understand it. I have a clearer recollection of another passage which discussed the difference between communication and communion. Now when you turn on the radio or the TV and you hear some commentator discussing Vietnam, he’s engaging in communication, isn’t he? He may not quite know what he’s communicating, but that’s his purpose, If you’re reading a poem, you are not receiving a communication, you’re participating in a discovery, and as a reader you participate in that discovery as a collaborator. We use communication; we participate in communion. Any work of art, any genuine work of art, poem, picture, or sculpture, is a discovery of a kind of knowledge about the human condition that we didn’t have before. On the contrary, the mass-medium commentator is trying to move us toward some course of action, which may be deplorable or of uncertain consequences. We had better beware of these people who communicate. I think it’s best to go off and sit by ourselves alone and read Shakespeare.

Kunitz: Communicators have an ulterior purpose in mind: they want to persuade you to believe something, do something, or maybe, under optimum conditions, buy something. The information that poetry conveys is incidental to its design as an instrument of aesthetic