Major Awards:
Oscar Blumenthal Prize, 1941
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship,1945-1946
Amy Lowell Traveling fellowship, 1953-1954
Levinson Prize, Poetry Magazine, 1956
Saturday Review Award, 1957
Ford Foundation Grant, 1958-1959
Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, University of Chicago, 1958
National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1959
Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems 1928-1958, 1959
Brandies University Creative Art Award Medal, 1965
Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 1968
New England Poetry Club Golden Rose Trophy, 1970
American Library Association Notable Book Citation, for the Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928-1978, 1979
Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry, 1980
National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship, 1984
Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Yale University Library, 1987
Walt Whitman Award Citation of Merit, with designation as State Poet of New York, 1987
Brandeis Medal of Achievement, 1965
National Book Award for Poetry, Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, 1995

United States Poet Laureate, 2000