"....Old heroes have never died."
by Maxine
These are the words of poet Stanley Kunitz that could easily apply to himself. He became the Poet Laureate of the United States at the age of 95 and lived to be 100. Kunitz was born in 1905 in Worcester, Mass. Kunitz's early work was intellectual and formal but later became more personal, often dealing with the themes of a lost father (His own committed suicide before Kunitz was born) or the tension of simultaneously living and dying. On this latter theme, Kunitz also found great satisfaction in gardening of which he was a master. Following is the first stanza of his poem, "Fathers and Sons:"
Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whitter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.
Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,
After the secret master of my blood,
Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love
Kept me in chains. Strode years; stretched into bird;
Raced through the sleeping country where I was young,
The silence unrolling before me as I came,
The night nailed like an orange to my brow.
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