After The Garden

Kunitz did not go mad, die young or yield to other forms of dissipation, despite tragedies in his early life. For years he made his living editing reference books and teaching at universities. At night he holed up in a spartan writing room where he read, wrote and rewrote until dawn.

“Stanley has managed to do what many of us fear is impossible,” [Marie] Howe once wrote. “He is a poet and he is sane.”