Intellectual First Poems Of Kunitz example essay topic
The witty, even defiantly intellectual first poems of Kunitz gave way, gradually, to a more autobiographical verse (as in The Testing Tree, 1971), which reminded some critics of Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell in their confessional phases. The poems of recent years have been restrained but quietly passionate, as in ' The Layers', where Kunitz writes: ' I have walked through many lives, / some of them my own, / and I am not who I was, / though some principle of being / abides, from which I struggle / not to stray. ' Always, Kunitz writes with an almost passionate clarity and with attention to formal details. Kunitz has also worked as a translator, creating deft English versions of Russian poems by Mandelstam, Yevtushenko, Stolzenberg, Akhmatova, and Akhmadulina. His critical essays are collected in A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly (Boston, 1975). Collections of verse include The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (Boston, 1979) and Next-to-last-Things (Boston, 1985).
For criticism, see Marie Hen ault, Stanley Kunitz (Boston, 1980) and Gregory Orr, Stanley Kunitz (New York, 1985). From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright?
1994 by Oxford University Press.