SOURCE: A review of Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978, in The Hudson Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 131–50.

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

[In The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Kunitz] arranges his poems in reverse chronological order, but the strategem cannot hide the nature of his poetic development. His early poems launch a direct assault on the Self, using myth ("For Proserpine"), rhetoric ("O Sion of my heart"), and melancholy ("I wept for my youth") as the traditional arsenal for one's siege. No wonder Kunitz decided not to begin his book with such rusty stuff; too bad it had to be included at all. Kunitz began to find his idiom in his second volume, published in 1944, with poems like 'Father and Son," although here too the Self-conscious rears its easy head: "At the water's edge, where the smothering ferns lifted / Their arms, 'Father...