Pulitzer-Winning Poet Stanley Kunitz Dies

with a brave moustache

and deep brown level eyes,

she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard.

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.

A high school class valedictorian, Mr. Kunitz won a scholarship to Harvard University. After graduating summa cum laude in 1926, he received a master's degree in English the next year and wanted to stay on as a professorial assistant. He was told that Jews were unwelcome, lest they make white Anglo-Saxon students feel inferior.

He took a reporting job on the Worcester Telegram and covered the execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In the newsroom, Mr. Kunitz earned the nickname "Sacco" for his denunciations of the trial judge, Webster Thayer.

In 1930, his first book, "Intellectual Things," was accepted by a young Doubleday editor named Ogden Nash who marked Mr. Kunitz for promise. Mr. Kunitz took the title from a William Blake line ("For a tear is an intellectual thing"), and his homage to Blake, John Donne and other English metaphysical poets made him distinct from more-lyrical American contemporaries.

One poem called "Promise Me" reads in part: