I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world.
Kunitz, quoted by poet Marie Howe in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR

If there is a poet who embodies “a lifetime of poetry”, it is Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz, born in Worcester, Massachusetts on July 29, 1905, published his first book of poetry Intellectual Things in 1930 at the age of 25, and his last, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, with Genine Lentine, in 2005. In a career that spanned 75 years, Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize (for Selected Poems, 1928-1958) in 1958, the National Book Award (for Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995)), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (for The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978) and the Bollingen Prize (for lifetime acheivement) in 1987. Kunitz served two terms as the Consultant on Poetry for the Library of Congress, one as the Poet Laureate of the United States and one as the state poet of New York. He was awarded the Harvard Centennial Medal in 1992, and the National Medal of Art in 1993.

As founder of Provincetown”s Fine Arts Work Center and New York”s Poet”s House, as a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and as an educator at Columbia University, Kunitz became a role model and mentor to other poets. In an interview with Melissa Block, poet and friend Marie Howe described her last few hours with Kunitz on the day that he died, and her reading to him from his own poetry at his request. The interview ends with what is perhaps the most elegant and eloquent elegy possible for the man who helped shape and transform American poetry over the last century, his own voice reading the conclusion of the poem that Marie Howe chose to read to him that afternoon.

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
The Layers, Stanley Kunitz

Kunitz passed away May 14, 2006 at the age of 100, but his spirit, his words and his influence will live on for generations to come.

Stanley Kunitz biography at Poets.org

Stanley Kunitz, A Surrogate Father of Poets – Washington Post Obituary

A Call for Memories from PoetryFoundation.org