Stanley Kunitz Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Weisburg

Critical Essay by Robert Weisburg

SOURCE: "Stanley Kunitz: The Stubborn Middle Way," in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 49-73.

In the following essay, Weisburg relates Kunitz's poetry to that of his contemporaries and discusses his major themes as they emerge in Selected Poems, 1928-1958: disease: generation, or the past: and monstrosity.

"The easiest poet to neglect is one who resists classification" [quoted from "Imagine Wrestling with an Angel: An Interview with Stanley Kunitz," in Salmagundi (Spring Summen 1973); all subsequent quoted comments of Kunitz are also extracted from this interview]. Had he spoken of himself, Stanley Kunitz might rather have said that we neglect the poet who becomes classified too early and too narrowly. Since a brief, if sympathetic, article by Jean Hagstrum in 1958, Kunitz's impressive canon has aroused no critical interest. Instead, he has been dubiously honored, by almost universal agreement, as a strange phenomenon called the "poet's poet," and...
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