SOURCE: “Stanley Kunitz and the Transubstantial World,” in Literary Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, Spring, 1981, pp. 413–26.

In the following essay, Davis provides an overview of Kunitz's poetic development in Intellectual Things, Passport to the War, The Testing-Tree, Selected Poems, and The Poems of Stanley Kunitz. Davis refutes the view of Kunitz as a derivative poet, drawing attention to his recurring archetypal images, technical skill, and effort to mediate between personal experience and universal myth.

Stanley Kunitz once said, “The originality of any poet consists to a considerable degree in finding those key images which forever haunt him, which make him different from others.”¹ The recent publication of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 (Little, Brown and Company, 1979) offers the opportunity to trace those images in development throughout Kunitz's long career, to find the obsessions that produce them, and to judge them in the context of the poetry as a whole. Almost...