In the following essay, Orr provides an analysis of the recurring images and personal symbolism in Kunitz's poetry, drawing particular attention to the significance of legend, quest, and parent-child motifs related to the poet's search for self-identity and meaning.

In the following essay, Weisberg provides an overview of Kunitz's artistic development and poetic style, drawing attention to his metaphysical concerns, creative vision, and the influence of T. S. Eliot and W. A. Auden.

In the following interview, conducted in 1990, Kunitz discusses his early life, formative experiences, education, beginnings as a poet, literary relationships, and his approach to writing and experiencing poetry.

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.

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.

In the following interview, Kunitz discusses formative events in his life and career, his approach to writing poetry, the origin of several of his poems, and the significance of poetry for the artist and society.

In the following essay, Mitchell reflects on the organic processes, universal revelations, and “ecstatic” voice in Kunitz's poetry, particularly that in Next-to-Last Things.

In the following interview, conducted in 1972, Kunitz discusses his formative influences and approach to writing poetry, his artistic development and changing existential and mythopoetic concerns, and his views on the significance of poetry and the place of the poet in contemporary society.

In the following essay, Hagstrum identifies major themes in Kunitz's poetry and traces the development of his technique, examining poems from Intellectual Things, Passport to the War, and Selected Poems, 1928-1958.

In the following interview, which was conducted on March 9, 1972, at Kunitz's home in New York, Kunitz comments on a number of subjects pertinent to his work, including the relationship between poetry and myth, his poetic development, the function of intellect and passion in poetry, the poet's position in society, his influences, his aversion to being called a "confessional poet," and the themes of guilt, love, and life and death in his verse.

In the following positive review of Passing Through, Yezzi provides an analysis of recurring “key images” and archetypes in Kunitz's poetry and comments favorably on Kunitz's effort to construct a “personal mythology.”

In the following interview, which is an edited transcript of a public interview conducted at Skidmore College in April, 1972, Kunitz discusses, among other subjects, trends in contemporary poetry, the process of composing verse, the function of poetry, the work of up-and-coming poets, his influences, and the practice of labeling poets.

Orr explores what he identifies as Kunitz's major theme: the son's quest for the father.

In the following essay, Ryan offers an analysis of Kunitz's poem “My Sisters” and discusses Kunitz's views on the social, moral, and personal significance of poetry.

In the following excerpt from his interview with Stitt, which occurred on May 3, 1990, Kunitz discusses his childhood, his education, his early aspirations to be a poet, the publication of his first book, his relationship with Theodore Roethke, and the physicality of language.

In the following interview, Kunitz comments on his life, work, creative inspiration, Jewish heritage, and the significance of poetry.

In the following excerpt, Moramarco and Sullivan discuss the historical context of mid-twentieth-century American poetry and provide an overview of Kunitz's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the development of his poetic style.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen comments on the task of the reviewer and offers a favorable evaluation of Passing Through, including close readings of two poems, “Three Floors” and “Touch Me,” from the volume.

In the following review, Young provides an overview of Kunitz's literary contributions and analysis of several exemplary poems from The Poetry of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978.

Praising the artistry and maturity of The Testing-Tree, Moss considers some of Kunitz's major themes, including the opposition of life and death, the search for the unknown father, religion, and nature.

In the following review of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Stitt argues that Kunitz's greatest strength lies in his high-minded rhetorical style, rather than the “middle” or “low” style associated with confessional poetry and Kunitz's professed democratic sympathies.

In the following essay, Kastor presents an overview of Kunitz's career and accomplishments, and reports Kunitz's comments on his work and the role of the poet.

In the following essay, Kunitz discusses poetic imagination and explains the genesis of his poem "The Abduction."

In the following essay, Wagoner predicts that the publication of Selected Poems, 1928-1958 will bring an end to critical neglect of Kunitz's poetry.

In the following review, Pettingell offers a positive assessment of Passing Through.

In the following review, Taylor offers a positive assessment of Passing Through.

In the following review, Christie offers a positive assessment of Passing Through.

In the following excerpt, Bedient discusses aspects of “strangeness” and the imagery of animals and elements in Next-to-Last Things.

In the following essay, Weeks provides an overview of Kunitz's literary career and poetry upon his appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States.

In the following review of Intellectual Things, the critic states that Kunitz shows promise as a poet, praises his gift for melody but cautions him against stylization.

Even if change were not so prominent among his themes, the reader of Kunitz's life work [in "The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978"] would have to be aware of changes time has wrought upon his style. From his first book, "Intellectual Things" (1930) through the "Selected Poems" (1958) … Kunitz pursued a style that even for those times was formidably ornate. His rhythms and diction harked back to the Elizabethan sonneteers and the Jacobean drama...

In the following essay, D'Evelyn provides an overview of Kunitz's career and discusses the poem “Day of Foreboding” from Next-to-Last Things.

In the following excerpt from a review of Passing Through, Barber marvels at Kunitz's "exemplary resilience" and "inexhaustible " curiosity.

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

For nearly half a century Mr. Kunitz has been giving us poems remarkable for their compactness and force. Now, in his seventieth year, he presents us with [A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly,] a collection of prose pieces which—being drawn from many times and many publications—might seem superficially to be too disparate to cohere an an organic whole, constituting one more bibliographically useful but experientially unsatisfying potpourri. But Mr. Kunitz is not a superficial writer, and he deser...

[Passport to the War] is a sincere and sound achievement. It is the work of a talented craftsman, with a sharp and elegant mind, and it concerns itself with the most significant problem of the modern world—the murderous and efficient mechanization of our environment that has invaded and corrupted the mind itself. This problem is implicit everywhere in Mr. Kunitz's poems, where under the pressure of our failure, energies that might have been concentrated upon the service of humanity or the love...

In the following excerpt, Brownjohn offers a positive assessment of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978.

In the following review, Idema offers a favorable assessment of Next-to-Last Things.

[A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly] represents the varied interests of a poet who first came to public attention with the traditionally thin volume of verse, Intellectual Things, in the 1920s. It has a freshness and a "kind of order, kind of folly" treatment of many contemporary events that is rarely found in a collection of previously published essays, random speeches, and remarks made for "occasional" situations. As a principal participant in the development of American verse si...

In the following review of Passport to the War, Schorer comments that Kunitz's "'metaphysical' style" has become less imitative since the publication of his first volume of poetry.

Cotter reviews Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, briefly remarking on Kunitz's poetic development.

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.

[Stanley Kunitz is] forthright in facing and communicating the hopes and hazards of man's right knowledge [in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978]. "A poet," he tells us, "needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him," seeking his "darkest Africa." The pursuit of dangerous places takes Kunitz through several poetic incarnations. His verses go from dense and highly figured to almost transparently clear. The Platonic abstractions of a young man exper...

[That sophisticated craftsman, Stanley Kunitz] can commence a lyric with a couplet that might have been composed by one of the metaphysicals: "Lovers relentlessly contend to be / Superior in their identity:". Elsewhere he manipulates a parenthesis with the skill of Cummings, introduces the subliminal imagery of Roethke, sets down public ignominy in a witty shorthand similar to Auden's. But his poems would not be mistaken for theirs. In one, written "for money, rage, and love�...

I have carried some of [Stanley Kunitz's poems] in my head for twenty years, and they still ring there in delight. Listen to the opening lines of "Deciduous Branch":         Winter, that coils in the thickets now,        Will glide from the fields; the swinging rain        Be knotted with flowers; on every ...

Mr. Kunitz is, after thirty years' writing, brought to us [in Selected Poems: 1928–1958] with rich plaudits from his fellow-American poets. He is indeed a big poet, given to traditional poses and metres, but holding them both with muscular professional skill. He is a rift-loader, a maker of weighted lines, elaborating complex figures with golden-mouth magniloquence. He will frankly use the big word, the large statement qualified only by the cleanness of its expression. 'I suffer the twe...