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Date: October 7, 1998
Princeton Acquires Stanley Kunitz Papers
Princeton, N.J. -- The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, has acquired the papers of the eminent American poet Stanley Kunitz. The poet, born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905, resides in New York City and Provincetown, Mass. Kunitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his Selected Poems, 1928-1958 and has received many other literary prizes and national honors including the Bolligen Prize in Poetry, 1987, and a National Book Award, 1995.
Kunitz is the author of 11 volumes of poetry published between 1930 and 1995, and he is also well-known for his work on English translations of the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtuschenko and Andrei Voznesensky. Kunitz’s own poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has taught at many American universities and at Princeton was a Council of the Humanities visiting senior fellow for 1978-89 and poet-in-residence for 1978.
Dating from the 1920s to the present, the papers include approximately 60 linear feet of literary manuscripts and drafts, extensive correspondence with authors and publishers, translation and publication files, photographs, heavily annotated books, and other materials. The papers include his working files and correspondence for Living Authors: A Book of Biographies (1931), Authors Today and Yesterday (1933), American Authors, 1600-1900 (1938), and other biographical directories and anthologies of poetry.
Many American authors are well-represented in his correspondence over eight decades, including Elizabeth Bishop, Peter Davison, Tess Gallagher, Louis Gluck, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Louis Untermeyer, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and others. Of particular interest is a substantial file of correspondence and connected typescripts of poems by Theodore Roethke. The Department already had editions of Kunitz’s published works in the Leonard Milberg Collection of American Poets.