Stanley Kunitz, who died Sunday at 100, was among the nation’s most lauded poets. Recognized by peers for his brilliance from his days at Harvard, Kunitz slowly produced a body of work that garnered him a Pulitzer at 55, and, at 95, an appointment as U.S. poet laureate.

Although he had published no new poems in over a decade, Kunitz was productive nearly to the end, and celebrated his centenary last July, with a book of reflections and reminiscences titled “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.”

If he was celebrated at the end, Kunitz was virtually unknown for much of his career, except by other poets, many of whom revered him for his stirring, often metaphysical language. In 1968, the Yale Literary Magazine asked W.H. Auden why Kunitz was not better known. “It’s strange, but give him time,” Auden said. “A hundred years or so. He’s a patient man.”

Time seems to be proving Auden right, in part because of the way Kunitz wrestled with universal themes like loss, identity, and fate. In a poem from the 1970s, “The Layers,” he wrote,

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

“The Layers” was inspired in part by the deaths of family members. The image of his father, a clothing manufacturer in Worcester, Mass., who drank carbolic acid shortly before Kunitz was born, recurs in his poetry, as in “The Portrait” (1969):

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.

Kunitz’s mother was resourceful if not always warm – birthdays were not celebrated and young Stanley was raised mainly by his sisters – and family fortunes rebounded as she reconstituted her dead husband’s nearly bankrupt business. Predictably for one who would become a poet, Kunitz was a bookish lad, the sort who hung about in libraries and adopted pet words. Yet he also had time to play in the woods and quarries around Worcester, and became a fine tennis player and shortstop on his high school team. He attended Harvard on scholarship in 1922, and graduated summa cum laude. He was reportedly denied employment at Harvard after earning a masters degree in English there because he was a Jew.

He worked briefly as a butcher’s assistant, and then as a newspaper reporter. He meanwhile completed a novel, which he “heroically destroyed.” The highlight of his job on the Worcester Telegram was covering the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, whom he was convinced had been framed. Kunitz came to New York to try to find a publisher for the condemned men’s letters from prison, but could find no one interested in issuing such inflammatory material. Undaunted, he found work at the H.W. Wilson Company, where, starting in 1927, he set about compiling reference books of short author biographies, using the pseudonym “Dilly Tante.” He continued this work through the 1950s.

In 1930, Kunitz’s first poetry collection, “Intellectual Things,” received a warm welcome from critics, including William Rose Benet of the Saturday Review of Literature, who welcomed the young man as a “true seer” and “born poet,” adding, “his words sorcerize.” The collection included “I Dreamed I Was old”:

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.
…
I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,
And cozy women dead that by my side
Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not
Remembering how in my youth I cried.

The same year “Intellectual Things” was published, Kunitz married and moved to a 100-acre farm in Connecticut, where he ploughed the fields with a pair of white oxen and sold herbs at farmer’s markets. The farm was eventually destroyed in a tornado, and Kunitz moved to Bucks County, Pa. His first marriage ended in divorce, in 1937.

A pacifist and conscientious objector, Kunitz was drafted and spent much of the war cleaning latrines stateside. His second collection of poems, “Passport to the War,” was published in 1944. Again, he met with critical huzzahs, although high achievement in metaphysical poetry was not the key to fame in wartime.

After the war, Kunitz held a series of academic appointments. He stayed at Bennington College for three years, until a storied confrontation over Groucho Marx’s daughter, who had violated curfew, led him to throw a potted plant in the college president’s face. He avoided accepting tenure everywhere, he told interviewers, because he thought it would doom his creativity; he told a similar story about why he left his second wife and their young daughter, ironically, since he wrote so much about missing his own father.

After Kunitz won his Pulitzer in 1959, for his third collection of poems, he bought a home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent most summers gardening. In 1962, he married his third wife, Elise Asher, a poet and artist. He became part of the Greenwich Village art scene centered around the Cedar Tavern. He later helped found Poet’s House, the New York archive and literary center.

Kunitz’s productivity seemed to increase with age; having published just three volumes in his first seven decades, he went on to publish nine more, including “The Testing Tree” (1971), “The Wellfleet Whale” (1983), and “Passing Through” (1995). He remained politically involved, as well.

In 2003, he read at Avery Fisher Hall in a program originally slated for the White House that was called off when the administration discovered that some poets intended to use it as a forum for registering protests against the Iraq war. Kunitz chose to read from “Night Letter,” written shortly before World War II in lines that recall Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

My dear, is it too late for peace, too late
For men to gather at the wells to drink
The sweet water; too late for fellowship
and laughter at the forge; too late for us
To say, “Let us be good to one another”?
The lamps go singly out; the valley sleeps;
I tend the last light shining on the farms
And keep for you the thought of love alive,
As scholars dungeoned in an ignorant age
Tended the embers of the Trojan fire.

Stanley Kunitz

Born July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Mass.; died May 14 at his home in Manhattan; survived by a daughter, a stepdaughter, and five grandchildren.