Stanley Kunitz, 100; his poetry fused elegance, earthiness

Stanley Kunitz, one of America's most-honored poets and a mainstay of the Provincetown literary community, died early Sunday at his Manhattan home. He was 100. The announcement of Mr. Kunitz's death came from his publisher, W.W. Norton.

Among Mr. Kunitz's honors were a Pulitzer Prize, for ''Selected Poems: 1928-1958," and a National Book Award, for ''Passing Through: The Later Poems" (1995). He received the Bollingen Prize, for lifetime achievement in poetry, in 1987, and a National Medal of the Arts in 1993.

Mr. Kunitz enjoyed the rare distinction of being even more beloved than honored. When his selection as the nation's poet laureate was announced in 2000, the incumbent, Robert Pinsky, said it made him ''proud for the office, glad for us all." He hailed his successor, who was then 95, for his ''vigor, engagement, care for the art and for young poets and their work, feisty energy, idealism about art and poetry."

His longevity helped make Mr. Kunitz a one-man anthology of 20th century American poetry. Marianne Moore published his poems in The Dial. Ogden Nash edited his first book. W.H. Auden was among his admirers. Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke were two of his best friends. Allen Ginsberg brought him a pre-publication version of ''Howl."

Mr. Kunitz's students and proteges included such well-known poets as Carolyn Forche, James Wright, and two future poet laureates, Louise Gluck and Robert Hass. He served as editor of the influential Yale Younger Poets series from 1969 to 1977. He was a past state poet of New York and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Yet Mr. Kunitz was an exemplary figure in poetry not only for the honors he gathered and the company he kept. He, too, knew the less exalted side of the poet's life: No fewer than eight publishers rejected the Pulitzer-winning ''Selected Poems."

Starting in 1957, Mr. Kunitz divided his time between Provincetown and New York. He was a founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the center's common room is named for him.

Hunter O'Hanian, the center's director, called Mr. Kunitz's death ''a true loss for the community" in a telephone interview yesterday.

''Stanley had such generosity of spirit," O'Hanian said. ''He was always willing to talk to young poets. He had a tremendous amount of humanity. He didn't allow his old age to affect who he was as a person; he didn't surrender to age. He worked well into his late 90s. He kept on learning, he kept on reading, he kept on sharing, he kept on engaging with people."

''I never think of myself as having outlived my useful existence," Mr. Kunitz told The Boston Globe in 2000. ''I don't wake up as a nonagenarian. I wake up as a poet. I think that's a big difference."

Mr. Kunitz started out writing a relatively formal and somewhat opaque verse. Over the years, his writing became, as he put it ''simpler, more open, more intimate." He never strayed from his early masters: Keats, Hopkins, late Yeats, the Metaphysical Poets, and, above all, Blake. Again and again in Mr. Kunitz's poetry, one sees re-created Blake's ability to combine the concrete and direct with the exalted and mystical.

A fascination with nature is the great constant in Mr. Kunitz's poetry. (It was also a constant in his life: A passionate gardener, he twice tried his hand at farming.) ''I have lived in the country most of my life," he once said. ''Urban life is satisfying for the moment, but for refreshment and restoration of my primitive impulses I need the country or the seashore: the natural world."

In 2005, Mr. Kunitz published ''The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden." The book's appearance coincided with his 100th birthday.

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was born in Worcester, the son of Solomon Z. and Yetta Helen (Jasspon). He had a horse-and-buggy boyhood -- literally. At 9, in Quinnapoxet, a hamlet near Worcester, Mr. Kunitz drove a carriage, working as a lamplighter.

A product of Worcester public schools, he graduated from Harvard with a summa cum laude degree in English in 1926. He pursued a doctorate but dropped out after being informed that ''Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew." He went to work as a reporter and editor on The Worcester Telegram. His most memorable assignment was covering the Sacco and Vanzetti capital murder case. It was also the most eventful: Bartolomeo Vanzetti's letters so impressed him he went to New York to try to find a publisher for them. Mr. Kunitz failed but ended up staying there.

His first book of poems, ''Intellectual Things," was published in 1930. He supported himself editing literary reference books, something he would do off and on for the next few decades. There were his two attempts at farming: first in Connecticut, then Pennsylvania. His first marriage failed. His second marriage produced a daughter, Gretchen, but it also ended in divorce. Mr. Kunitz married again, in 1958, to Elise Asher, a painter and poet. She died in 2004.

Despite being a conscientious objector, he was drafted and served in the Army during World War II, rising to the rank of sergeant. He got his revenge on the military when he and Robert Lowell organized a protest against the Vietnam War in 1965 that turned the White House Arts Festival into what he proudly termed ''a passionate fiasco."

After World War II, Roethke got Mr. Kunitz a teaching job at Bennington College. He later taught at what is now New School University, Brandeis, the University of Washington, and Columbia, among other institutions. ''I never accepted tenure because I recognized that it would be fatal for me to be a professor who wrote poetry rather than a poet who had a job in the academy," he said in 2000.

When asked in a 2005 Globe interview about the importance of poetry in his life, Mr. Kunitz said, ''Poetry has been so much a part of my life that it's hard to think of it in those terms. Poetry is inseparable from my life force, and that began very early. It was a great gift, and it has sustained me through the years, and the losses that have attended those years."

In addition to his daughter, of Orinda, Calif., Mr. Kunitz leaves a stepdaughter, Babette Becker, of New York; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A private ceremony will be held in Provincetown this weekend. Memorial services are planned for this summer at the Fine Arts Work Center and in New York.