One Hundred Years and Patience

Today is poet Stanley Kunitz's birthday, and The Writer's Almanac shares this story about him. He published his first book of poems in 1930 and another in 1944, but it was barely noticed.

He was so unknown that his third book, Selected Poems (1958), was rejected by eight publishers - three of them refused to even read it. When it was finally published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When someone asked W.H. Auden why nobody knew about Stanley Kunitz, Auden said: "It's strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He's a patient man."

It was more than 10 years before he published his next book, The Testing Tree (1971), and slowly but surely, people began to take notice. He was appointed the poet laureate when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100.

He's a patient man. I love that.