SOURCE: "The Generation of Auden," in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody from Thomas Hardy to Robert Lowell, University of Michigan Press, 1965, pp. 279-82.

In the following excerpt, Gross focuses on meter and sound in Kunitz's poetry, praising him for his technical accomplishments.

… Kunitz' acknowledged masters are Donne, Baudelaire, and Eliot. He pays each the formal compliment of allusion or translation; in the blank-verse poem "The Class Will Come to Order" a celebrated line from The Relique,

 A bracelet of bright hair about the bone 

appears in witty paraphrase:

 Absurd though it may seem,
Perhaps there's too much order in this world;
The poets love to haul disorder in,
Braiding their wrists with her long mistress hair,
And when the house is tossed about our ears,
The governors must set it right again.
How wise was he who banned them from his state! 

A...