Selected Poems 1928–1958
by Stanley Kunitz
Summary
Selected Poems 1928 to 1958 gathers three decades of Stanley Kunitz's work, beginning with his 1930 debut Intellectual Things and continuing through Passport to the War, a 1944 collection that had gone largely unnoticed at the time, into the newer poems that closed out this Pulitzer winning volume. Kunitz's earliest poems favored structured formal verse, iambic pentameter and careful traditional meter, before his style loosened over the following decades into a freer, more open prosody, and reading the book in sequence means watching that formal evolution happen poem by poem across a genuinely long stretch of a single working life.
The death of Kunitz's father, who died by suicide six weeks before Kunitz was born, shaped his work from the very start, and self examination built around that absence, alongside a sustained attention to the natural world, recurs throughout the collection regardless of which decade a given poem comes from. That combination, intellectual rigor inherited from his early formal training and a deeply personal, sometimes unresolved grief that predates his own memory, gives the Selected Poems its real continuity even as the surface style shifts from tight meter toward something looser.
Reading it means encountering a poet whose early work, including the overlooked Passport to the War, found almost no audience on first publication, only to have this later gathering finally secure him wide recognition after nearly thirty years of comparatively quiet work. It suits a reader interested in a poet's craft actually changing shape over decades, and in verse that keeps returning to an inherited, unresolved family loss without ever treating that return as simple repetition.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Stanley Kunitz the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems 1928 to 1958, a book that, before Little, Brown finally published it, had reportedly been turned down by a number of other publishers unwilling to take on a career spanning collection by a poet who had not yet had a major popular success.
The prize marked a real turning point after decades of comparatively quiet recognition; Kunitz went on to receive the Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement, the National Medal of Arts, and two terms in the Library of Congress poetry post, as Consultant in Poetry from 1974 and as Poet Laureate from 2000. His later collection Passing Through: The Later Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995, extending a career whose first major public breakthrough, this 1959 Pulitzer, had come only after publishers had already once passed on the very book that won it.