SOURCE: “Dazzling,” in New Statesman, November 2, 1979, pp. 686–87.

In the following review of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Motion finds shortcomings in Kunitz's early work, though cites redeeming qualities in his later poetry.

[W. B.] Yeats is usually cited as the exception who proves the rule that most poets, after peaking somewhere in their 30s, steadily deteriorate as they get older. And Yeats, it seems, is mainly responsible for making Stanley Kunitz another such odd-man-out. If the early work in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 is anything to go by, its author's development was severely retarded by admiration for Innisfree and its environs. In recent years, however, he's stopped winding himself in ‘the bright thread of a dream,’ and turned his back on myth kitties. The first third of the book—it's arranged in reverse chronology—is consistently unillusioned and contains the rewards of half a century's effort to...