Pulitzer-Winning Poet Stanley Kunitz Dies

After his military discharge, he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for creative writing and began a succession of teaching duties at colleges throughout the Northeast. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia University from 1967 to 1985. He also was a founder of Poets House, a New York-based poetry library, and of a long-term artists' residency program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.

His reputation was drastically enhanced when he received the Pulitzer for "Selected Poems: 1928-1958" (1958), a volume he said three publishers initially refused to read and five more rejected. In the Saturday Review, poet John Ciardi wrote, "At times one must labor to follow the subtleties of his perception. The point is that the labor will not be in vain."

At the time, Mr. Kunitz replied to repeated criticisms of the density of his work: "A poet cannot concern himself with being fair to the reader. Time will tell. All poems contain a degree of mystery, as poetry is a discovery of one's hidden self. . . . Poetry is not concerned with communication; it has roots in magic, incantation, and spell-casting."

Thirteen years passed before his next book, "The Testing-Tree" (1971), which had a marked shift in tone. An admirer, poet Robert Lowell, wrote, "The old Delphic voice has learned to speak 'words that cats and dogs can understand.' "

"The Testing-Tree" focused on his feelings toward his father. It also spoke of the limits in pursuing the unknowable.

From 1974 to 1976, Mr. Kunitz was the Library of Congress's consultant on poetry, the precursor title to poet laureate. In 2000, he succeeded Robert Pinsky and became the 10th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Mr. Kunitz was regarded as a mentor to many poets, including two future poet laureates, Louise Gluck and Robert Hass, as well as Sylvia Plath.

"Essentially," he once said, "what I try to do is to help each person rediscover the poet within himself. I say 'rediscover,' because I am convinced that it is a universal human attribute to want to play with words, to beat out rhythms, to fashion images, to tell a story, to construct forms."

He added: "The key is always in his possession: what prevents him from using it is mainly inertia, the stultification of the senses as a result of our one-sided educational conditioning and the fear of being made ridiculous or ashamed by the exposure of his feelings."

His collection "Passing Through" (1995) won a National Book Award. He was also a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts and the Yale University library's prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry.

In his 100th year, he published "The Wild Braid," a collection of poems, photographs and ruminations on gardening.

Early in his adult life, Mr. Kunitz spent time on a 100-acre herb farm in Connecticut, which was destroyed when a tornado blew through.

He remained a passionate gardener, once saying, "It's the way things are: death and life inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil."

His marriages to poet Helen Pearce Kunitz and actress Eleanor Evans Kunitz ended in divorces. For many years, he was an absentee father to the daughter he had with his second wife. He said his writing complicated his relationships.

His third wife, painter and poet Elise Asher, whom he married in 1958, died in 2004. She illustrated some of her husband's books.

Survivors include a daughter from his second marriage, Dr. Gretchen Kunitz of Orinda, Calif.; a stepdaughter, Dr. Babette Becker of Manhattan; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.