Biography
Stanley Kunitz was among America’s most distinguished poets. Born in Worcester, Mass, in 1905, he was known for subtle craft, intellectual grace and “work with a lifetime steeped in it,” as one writer noted. Kunitz received a Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems, 1928-1958. In The Testing-Tree, he “ruthlessly prods wounds,” a reviewer wrote, departing from the formal, intricate style of early works to his later style—spare, emotional poems, many probing the repercussions of his father’s suicide. Appointed Poet Laureate of the United States twice, in 1973 and 2000, when he was 95, Kunitz was still publishing poems of startling richness, among his finest. A teacher, influence, and mentor to generations of poets, he received the National Book Award for Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected in 2000. Kunitz lived in New York, spending summers in Provincetown. Mass., until his death at 100 in 2006.