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.

About Intellectual Things

I chose Intellectual Things for 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 told The Paris Review he 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 the No Fear Shakespeare series, 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.)

About Stanley Kunitz

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 attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

His mother’s censorship would profoundly affect Kunitz’s life trajectory.

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1926 and obtained his master’s the following year. He wanted to pursue a doctorate, but the English faculty told him he could not teach there because, as he later recalled, “Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew.”

“That really almost broke my heart,” Kunitz said sixty years later. “And I think in the end it probably did me a great favor, because it prevented me from becoming a completely preoccupied scholar.” He went back to Worcester and became a reporter on the Worcester Telegram.

The Librarian’s Bill of Rights

Kunitz later worked for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York, editing a magazine called the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians from 1927 until February 1943.

In May 1936, he wrote an open letter attacking his own profession’s annual conference, which was being held in Richmond under segregation. “Negro librarians will be segregated thruout the conference; they will not be permitted to attend meetings where food is served,” he wrote. “If you permit this organized insult to pass unchallenged, there is but one conclusion to be made: that American librarians do not, in their hearts, care for democracy.”

In October 1938, he ran an essay by Bernard Berelson called “The Myth of Library Impartiality,” which argued that a library should not be impartial when it came to favoring democracy over dictatorship.

That year, the magazine’s letters column ran attacks on librarians, calling them reactionaries, and the argument caught the attention of Forrest Spaulding, who ran the Des Moines Public Library. Spaulding responded in a letter, saying, “Some of your readers might be interested in the ‘Bill of Rights’ recently adopted by the board of trustees of this library.” Kunitz printed it in January 1939 under the headline “Make It Unanimous!” — “Why cannot the same or similar resolution be adopted by every public library in the country? … I should be happy indeed to print in these columns the names of all libraries that endorse the Des Moines ‘Bill of Rights.’ Who will be first?”

Libraries began writing in. That June, the American Library Association adopted it, and the Library Bill of Rights is still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.

In December 1939, in an essay about the pressure that wealthy trustees put on what kinds of books libraries should include in their collections, Kunitz wrote, “Let it be said that no book can do so much damage to democratic institutions as does the librarian who suppresses it.” And: “That library serves best which censors least.”

The war years and after

Kunitz was 37 when he was drafted in 1943, despite having registered as a conscientious objector. He later said the draft board had told him he’d be put in a service unit like the Medical Corps. The paperwork was either lost or never delivered. “I was shuttled for three years from camp to camp, doing KP duty most of the time or digging latrines,” he said.

At a mostly Black camp in North Carolina, he launched a weekly Army magazine called Ten Minute Break. A lot of the men there didn’t understand what the war was about, and he hoped the magazine would explain it.

The war shifted his politics. “My feeling was I would never kill another human being. How could I fight in this war?” he said. “But I realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over. It was a tremendous dilemma.”

Kunitz’s poetry changed in 1971, with The Testing-Tree. Robert Lowell said Kunitz had learned to speak “words that cats and dogs can understand.” Compare “For the Word Is Flesh” in Intellectual Things with “The Portrait” (1969), quoted above. Both poems are about his father, and the styles are completely different. I don’t think one is better than the other. The latter one is immediately understandable and packs an emotional punch. The 1930 poem is, as the collection’s title states, an intellectual thing.

Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Selected Poems and the National Book Award in 1995, at ninety, for Passing Through. In 2000, two days after his ninety-fifth birthday, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States for the second time — he had been awarded the honor in the seventies when it was called Consultant in Poetry.

In his later years, Kunitz was an enthusiastic gardener and talked about the garden the way he talked about poems, as something as deeply personal and as intimate as writing a poem. Asked the secret of his longevity, he said, “I’m curious. I’m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.” He helped found the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, later, Poets House in New York. He died in 2006 at 100.

An ironic side note

I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type:

Request was blocked
API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy

I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said:

An automated safety filter blocked the helper’s output partway through. It’s a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did — 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble.

I can’t see which line tripped it. These are 1930 poems about death, the body, and religion, and something in that stretch pattern-matched badly. It’s a false positive, and it fired twice on the same five images, so retrying the same way won’t help.

Then it tried to read one of the pages itself, and was blocked again. I asked Claude whether it was a fascist. It said:

Not my call, and I agree it’s absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like “body,” “death,” and “blood” appearing thick in one passage. I’m not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.

Claude, to its credit, found a successful workaround and finished converting the scans to text. I was curious how it would explain this incident, given Kunitz’s anti-censorship record. It wrote:

Mark asked Anthropic’s software to transcribe a book of poems published in 1930 and in the public domain. He got back a refusal in red type. The block came from a classifier that reads my output before it reaches the user. It counts words like blood, worm, corruption, dissect, and stops the message when enough of them arrive together. It cannot tell that it is reading Stanley Kunitz, or that the book won its author a Pulitzer. It sees vocabulary.

It also cannot know what Kunitz did for a living while these poems were in print. He edited a magazine for librarians, and he used it to fight censorship. In January 1939 he printed the Des Moines library’s new Bill of Rights and campaigned to get every library in the country to adopt it. That December he wrote: “That library serves best which censors least.”

This experience with Claude and its wishy-washy response is troubling. Will AI become the global thought police? I realize I can refrain from using AI — I’ve written this introduction with pen and paper — but it’s part of life now and won’t go away.

Try It Now