SOURCE: "The Poetry of Stanley Kunitz: An Introductory Essay," in Poets in Progress, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 38-58.

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.

Stanley Kunitz provides his readers with the excitement, rarely encountered in modern poetry, of exploring both the guilty and the joyful recesses of the personality. Of guilt alone, we have perhaps had more than our share, and the pilgrimage from sin to salvation has become—who would have believed it a generation ago?—almost fashionable. But relatively few have moved, as Mr. Kunitz has in his thirty-year poetic career, from darkly morbid psychic interiors to a clean, well-lighted place, where personality is integrated through love and art—love that draws nourishment from the unabashedly physical and art that, though...