"He back tops the crowd--he surpasses himself, the outdated iron delivered to the white warmth of simplicity." that is what Robert Lowell acknowledged of the poetry of Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) and his evolving artistry. The interviews and conversations contained during this quantity derive from 4 a long time of Kunitz's wonderful occupation. They contact on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his paintings, his friendships within the sister arts of portray and sculpture, his interactions with Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his reviews on a number of poets: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, and Anna Akhmatova.

Kunitz emerged from a mid-sized commercial city in critical Massachusetts, surviving relatives tragedy and a feeling of private isolation and loneliness, to develop into an eloquent spokesman for poetry and for the ability of the human mind's eye. Kunitz has commented, "If we wish to be aware of what it felt prefer to be alive at any given second within the lengthy odyssey of the race, it's to poetry we needs to turn." His personal odyssey from "metaphysical loneliness" to a feeling of neighborhood with fellow writers and artists--by development associations like Poets condo and the high-quality Arts paintings middle in Provincetown, Massachusetts--is ever found in those interviews.