A Sack behind Him

Lately I had the pleasure of reviewing three American poets (John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell) whose work seemed to indicate a new development of content in American poetry. Their work had a real, if rugged interior life. But Mr Kunitz, though he has obtained a Pulitzer prize and, in the course of a lucrative career, two other prizes, a medal for poetry, two fellowships, an award, and two grants) cannot in any sense be called a pioneer. He writes according to the blueprint –

Within the city of the burning cloud,
Dragging my life behind me in a sack,
page 398 Naked I prowl, scourged by the black
Temptation of the blood grown proud.

Here at the monumental door
Carved with the curious legend of my youth,
I brandish the great bone of my death,
Beat once therewith and beat no more . . .

One cannot blame Mr Kunitz for feeling he has to be daimonic. The example of Hart Crane is before him. The critics chant, ‘We want blood on the page. Be smart as you like, boy, we like it, but you gotta be daimonic.’ So enters the weird humourless figure of Mr Kunitz as fireman, naked, dragging a sack behind him, scourged by unnameable temptation, and banging once with a big thighbone on a carved door. One wishes faintly that the life would climb out of the sack and speak; but it never does. Mr Kunitz writes very well. He has cashed in, quite unconsciously, on the great American patent – that electronic punching device by which anything can be turned into a poem – a lost wallet, a mailbox, a pigeon, a queasy feeling in the colon. And the ghost of Wallace Stevens, playing in limbo with a Chinese paper-snake, smiles benign approval.

1959 (202)