Stanley Kunitz Dies
Former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Kunitz dies at 100.
Stanley Kunitz, who was appointed the 10th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000 at the age of 95, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan.
Born in Massachusetts, Kunitz graduated from Harvard University and began his career as a journalist in his native Worcester. Always a poet, however, he published his first book Intellectual Things in 1930 at the age of 25.
Kunitz had a difficult childhood: his father committed suicide shortly before Stanley was born and his immigrant mother struggled to raise her family. His sisters died young, as did a stepfather, so much of his poetry deals with loss, particularly that of a father. In "Journal For a Daughter" he writes:
You say you had a father once:
his name was absence.
He left, but did not let you go.
Despite being a conscientious objector, Kunitz was drafted during World War II but remained a pacifist for the rest of his life. He was a vocal anti-war critic from the Vietnam conflict right up through the current war in Iraq.
Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for the book Selected Poems 1928-1958. Another book of selected poems, Passing Through, won the National Book Award in 1995, when the poet was 90 years old.
In later life he spent much of his time at his second home in Provincetown, Mass. where he passed the summer days in his beloved garden. He was also instrumental in forming the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown where he remained active until the very end of his life. He also co-founded The Poets House in New York. His final book, The Wild Braid was published when he was 99 and is a collection of poetry and photographs of his garden. His third wife, painter Elise Asher, died in 2004.
