Stanley Kunitz, A Surrogate Father of Poets

"He gave me some confidence there."

Kinnell and his wife used to give an annual Kunitz birthday party. A "very sociable person," Kunitz loved to sit in the middle of the table with 10 or 12 other poets and "talk to his equals, as he thought of us -- though we didn't really think that way."

"He was so beloved," said Lee Briccetti, the executive director of Poets House, a New York City archive and meeting place for poets that Kunitz helped found. Briccetti spoke yesterday of Kunitz's empathy for young artists and of his desire to build the kind of community around poetry he felt he'd lacked in his own youth.

She also recalled the poet's fondness for martinis. She once asked him for a glass of cranberry juice instead, but Kunitz returned with "an elegant martini beaker filled with olives. 'My dear,' he said, 'I have my reputation to uphold.' "

Greg Orr, another former Kunitz student who now teaches at the University of Virginia, recalled a recent visit that evoked Kunitz's undying passion for language. Orr was visiting him in Provincetown, Mass., and the old poet's current caregiver was asking his guests to each read three pages from "Moby-Dick" aloud.

Kunitz took his turn as well. "He read Melville's ornate, rhetorical sentences beautifully," Orr said. "Language always brought him alive again. He would just wrap his voice around the sentences in a kind of rapture."

Which is what poetry is, Orr added: "It's the rapture of rhythmical language."

"God bless the poet who lives 100 years," said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. But Kunitz almost didn't make it that far.

In 2003, when it appeared that he was on his deathbed, his friends gathered to say goodbye. Orr drove up from Virginia. Kinnell, Rudman and Briccetti were among many others who came.

People read Kunitz's favorite poetry aloud. Kinnell read some Yeats ("I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree") and some William Blake -- who he thinks may have been Kunitz's favorite poet -- including Blake's "Jerusalem."

I will not cease from mental fight , he read. As he left, he asked Kunitz if he remembered the line. Kunitz said he did.

"Will you?" Kinnell asked him.

"I will not cease from mental fight," Kunitz replied. The next morning, Kinnell came to his apartment expecting to find him gone. Instead, he found his friend eating breakfast.

"Our thinking," Orr said yesterday, "was that he had so much fun at his farewell party that he didn't want to leave."