{"id":46851,"date":"2026-09-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=46851"},"modified":"2026-08-28T00:57:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T07:57:37","slug":"the-1930-poetry-book-that-anthropic-tried-to-censor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/the-1930-poetry-book-that-anthropic-tried-to-censor\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1930 poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Cover for Intellectual Things (1930)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Intellectual Things (1930) is Stanley Kunitz\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About\u00a0Intellectual Things<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I chose Intellectual Things<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poems in the slim volume weren\u2019t 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\u2019s struggle to come to terms with the fact that reason and logic can only go so far in understanding life and mortality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz later told The Paris Review<\/em> 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: \u201cFor a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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<\/em> series, which puts Shakespeare\u2019s original on the left page and a modern English interpretation on the right. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Stanley Kunitz<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t learn the details until he was a grown man and went to city hall and asked for the death certificate. \u201cAge 39. Death by suicide. Carbolic acid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz\u2019s mother forbade Kunitz from mentioning his father. \u201cShe obliterated every trace of him,\u201d Kunitz said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cThe Portrait,\u201d he recounted what happened:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

His mother\u2019s censorship would profoundly affect Kunitz\u2019s life trajectory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude<\/em> from Harvard in 1926 and obtained his master\u2019s 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, \u201cAnglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat really almost broke my heart,\u201d Kunitz said sixty years later. \u201cAnd I think in the end it probably did me a great favor, because it prevented me from becoming a completely preoccupied scholar.\u201d He went back to Worcester and became a reporter on the Worcester Telegram<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Librarian\u2019s Bill of Rights<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz later worked for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York, editing a magazine called the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians<\/em> from 1927 until February 1943.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May 1936, he wrote an open letter attacking his own profession\u2019s annual conference, which was being held in Richmond under segregation. \u201cNegro librarians will be segregated thruout the conference; they will not be permitted to attend meetings where food is served,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 1938, he ran an essay by Bernard Berelson called \u201cThe Myth of Library Impartiality,\u201d which argued that a library should not be impartial when it came to favoring democracy over dictatorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That year, the magazine\u2019s 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, \u201cSome of your readers might be interested in the \u2018Bill of Rights\u2019 recently adopted by the board of trustees of this library.\u201d Kunitz printed it in January 1939 under the headline \u201cMake It Unanimous!\u201d \u2014 \u201cWhy cannot the same or similar resolution be adopted by every public library in the country? \u2026 I should be happy indeed to print in these columns the names of all libraries that endorse the Des Moines \u2018Bill of Rights.\u2019 Who will be first?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201cLet it be said that no book can do so much damage to democratic institutions as does the librarian who suppresses it.\u201d And: \u201cThat library serves best which censors least.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war years and after<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019d be put in a service unit like the Medical Corps. The paperwork was either lost or never delivered. \u201cI was shuttled for three years from camp to camp, doing KP duty most of the time or digging latrines,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a mostly Black camp in North Carolina, he launched a weekly Army magazine called Ten Minute Break<\/em>. A lot of the men there didn\u2019t understand what the war was about, and he hoped the magazine would explain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war shifted his politics. \u201cMy feeling was I would never kill another human being. How could I fight in this war?\u201d he said. \u201cBut I realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over. It was a tremendous dilemma.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz\u2019s poetry changed in 1971, with The Testing-Tree<\/em>. Robert Lowell said Kunitz had learned to speak \u201cwords that cats and dogs can understand.\u201d Compare \u201cFor the Word Is Flesh\u201d in Intellectual Things<\/em> with \u201cThe Portrait\u201d (1969), quoted above. Both poems are about his father, and the styles are completely different. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s title states, an intellectual thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Selected Poems<\/em> and the National Book Award in 1995, at ninety, for Passing Through<\/em>. In 2000, two days after his ninety-fifth birthday, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States for the second time \u2014 he had been awarded the honor in the seventies when it was called Consultant in Poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201cI\u2019m curious. I\u2019m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.\u201d He helped found the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, later, Poets House in New York. He died in 2006 at 100.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An ironic side note<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Request was blocked
API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An automated safety filter blocked the helper\u2019s output partway through. It\u2019s a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did \u2014 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble.<\/p>

I can\u2019t see which line tripped it. These are 1930 poems about death, the body, and religion, and something in that stretch pattern-matched badly. It\u2019s a false positive, and it fired twice on the same five images, so retrying the same way won\u2019t help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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

Not my call, and I agree it\u2019s 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 \u201cbody,\u201d \u201cdeath,\u201d and \u201cblood\u201d appearing thick in one passage. I\u2019m not the one refusing \u2014 the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s anti-censorship record. It wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark asked Anthropic\u2019s 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.<\/p>

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\u2019s new Bill of Rights and campaigned to get every library in the country to adopt it. That December he wrote: \u201cThat library serves best which censors least.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 I\u2019ve written this introduction with pen and paper \u2014 but it\u2019s part of life now and won\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Try It Now<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
  1. Read one Intellectual Things<\/em> poem twice, then ask an AI (or a reference book to explain the obscure references. Did that make the experience better or worse?<\/li>
  2. Read \u201cFor the Word Is Flesh\u201d (1930) and \u201cThe Portrait\u201d (1969). Both are about Kunitz\u2019s father, who committed suicide before he was born. Notice how his style changed. Do you prefer one over the other?<\/li>
  3. Read Kunitz\u2019s January 1939 \u201cRoving Eye\u201d colum<\/a>n and the Des Moines Library Bill of Rights<\/a>. It\u2019s still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \n\n\n\n

    Download the Book Freak Edition<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    This is the third book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club<\/strong>, a benefit for paid subscribers. Every month, I take an interesting and obscure public-domain book and turn it into an ebook in EPUB and PDF formats, add the cover from the 1st edition and a short introduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Your copy of <\/strong>Intellectual Things<\/strong><\/em> is linked below<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If you\u2019re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5\/month or $45\/year). Join the club here.<\/a> And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.,org and I\u2019ll comp you. …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n\n\n\n

    Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run\u00a0Recomendo<\/a>, the\u00a0Cool Tools website<\/a>, a\u00a0YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0podcast<\/a>, and other newsletters, including\u00a0Recomendo Deals<\/a>,\u00a0Gar\u2019s Tips & Tools<\/a>,\u00a0Nomadico<\/a>,\u00a0What\u2019s in my NOW?<\/a>,\u00a0Tools for Possibilities<\/a>,\u00a0Books That Belong On Paper<\/a>, and\u00a0Book Freak<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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