SOURCE: “Lost Worlds: Midcentury Revisions of Modernism,” in Containing Multitudes: Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Twayne, 1998, pp. 1–36.

In the following excerpt, Moramarco and Sullivan discuss the historical context of mid-twentieth-century American poetry and provide an overview of Kunitz's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the development of his poetic style.

“O world so far away! O my lost world!” 

—Theodore Roethke, “Otto”

“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” 

—Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”

Major midcentury poets like Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz, born in the first two decades of the twentieth century and at the center stage of poetry by the fifties, inherited the heaviest of burdens. Not only did they work in the shadows of their towering predecessors—T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams, who were...