Intellectual Things (1930) is Stanley Kunitz’s first book, published when he was 24. It has poems about the body, death, and the limits of reason. Kunitz was a lifelong anti-censorship activist, won the Pulitzer, and served twice as U.S. Poet Laureate.
This is the third Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.
I choseIntellectual Thingsfor the Book Freak Deep Cuts book club because the title caught my eye and because it entered the public domain this year. No copies exist on Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, but I found a scan of the first edition on Google Books and converted it to text.
The poems in the slim volume weren’t easy for me to understand on a first reading, but the structure and word choice were intriguing. I could pick out some of the ideas in the poems. To me, they seem to be about Kunitz’s struggle to come to terms with the fact that reason and logic can only go so far in understanding life and mortality.
Kunitz later toldThe Paris Reviewhe had been writing under the influence of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets, John Donne and George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake, and Baudelaire. The title comes from Blake: “For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.”
After I read each poem, I ran it through Claude AI for an interpretation and an explanation of the obscure references. The explanations were helpful. Was it cheating to use AI this way? I don’t think so. I enjoyed reading each poem once or twice before asking Claude to supply its take. Its answers reminded me of theNo Fear Shakespeareseries, which puts Shakespeare’s original on the left page and a modern English interpretation on the right. I don’t think I’d be able to get through a Shakespeare play without hand-holding. (I included the AI interpretations of the poems in the back of the ebook.)
Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. His two older sisters died young. His mother was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who came over at 23 and made a living as a dress designer and manufacturer.
Six weeks before Stanley was born, his father, Solomon, killed himself in a public park in Worcester. His dressmaking business had gone bankrupt. Kunitz didn’t learn the details until he was a grown man and went to city hall and asked for the death certificate. “Age 39. Death by suicide. Carbolic acid.”
Kunitz’s mother forbade Kunitz from mentioning his father. “She obliterated every trace of him,” Kunitz said.
His mother believed she had thrown out every last thing belonging to her husband. But Kunitz found a pastel portrait of his father in the attic and brought it downstairs to show her. In a poem he wrote in 1969, called “The Portrait,” he recounted what happened:
When I came down from the atticwith the pastel portrait in my handof a long-lipped strangerwith a brave mustacheand deep brown level eyes,she ripped it into shredswithout a single wordand slapped me hard.In my sixty-fourth yearI can feel my cheekstill burning.
His mother’s censorship would profoundly affect Kunitz’s life trajectory.