SOURCE: “Stanley Kunitz: The Poetic Adversary,” in Washington Post, May 12, 1987, pp. D1, D6.

In the following essay, Kastor presents an overview of Kunitz's career and accomplishments, and reports Kunitz's comments on his work and the role of the poet.

Stanley Kunitz has always written deep into the night and through to morning and, when desperate publishers plead for an overdue essay from the 81–year-old poet, as they lately have been, the nights grow even longer. Over the last three, he has slept less than six hours. “The world's quiet then,” says Kunitz. “I feel that splendid isolation, which is fructifying, replenishing.”

And he does somehow manage to look replenished by those nights filled with writing, nights that have, over the last six decades, made him a dean of the poetic scene and won him the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and, this year, the Bollingen Prize. He will read...