SOURCE: “The Ineluctable Signature of Stanley Kunitz,” in Poetry, Vol. CXXXVI, No. 6, September, 1980, pp. 347–51.

In the following review of The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978, Stitt argues that Kunitz's greatest strength lies in his high-minded rhetorical style, rather than the “middle” or “low” style associated with confessional poetry and Kunitz's professed democratic sympathies.

Although Stanley Kunitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his Selected Poems, he is best known for the revolution in his style which occurred with the poems of The Testing-Tree, published in 1971. Robert Lowell (echoing virtually all the criticism devoted to Kunitz since that time) praised the volume for reflecting what he called “the drift of the age,” a movement away from tortured formality towards prosaic relaxation, away from metaphor and indirection towards clarity, the literal truth, Kunitz himself explained the change in this way: “A high style wants to be fed exclusively on high...