As a first-grader in Worcester, Massachusetts, poet Stanley Kunitz gazed up at the latest arrival of Halley's Comet, the celestial orbiter said to visit Earth about every 76 years:

. . . it was roaring down the stormtracks / of the Milky Way at frightful speed / and if it wandered off its course / and smashed into the earth / there'd be no school tomorrow.

That was 1910, school did convene the next day and each day after that for Kunitz, who later graduated from Harvard University. The poet was watching again when the comet soared across the sky in 1986, though it happened to be cloudy that night.

Fourteen years later, he is still living in Massachusetts and still writing the poetry for which he has won an array of top accolades.

This summer Kunitz turned 95, and this fall he will become the nation's tenth poet laureate.

"He continues to be a mentor and model for several generations of poets, and he brings to the office of poet laureate a lifetime of commitment to poetry," said Librarian of Congress James Billington in a statement from the library, which bestows the honor each year. He joins a lineage of modern masters of verse including Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Rita Dove and most recently, Robert Pinsky.

Amidst "the throes of interviewing," Kunitz reflected on his plans for the job by phone from his summer home in Provincetown, on Cape Cod.

"I will concentrate in helping young people in the school system to receive an adequate introduction to poetry. That involves training teachers and in general, supporting the reading and discussion of poetry," he said.

Kunitz's work will officially begin on Oct. 28, when he travels to Washington, D.C. for an inaugural reading.

No stranger to university education, Kunitz has taught at Yale, Princeton, Rutgers and Brandeis, but faced opposition in securing his first appointment.

In a 1974 interview for The Iowa Review, he explained:

"When I was about to receive my master's degree from Harvard, I assumed that I could stay on as a teaching assistant if I wanted to, not because I was already a poet but because of my scholarship record.

"As it turned out, I did not stay on; I was told directly through the head of the English Department that Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew, even a Jew with a summa cum laude. That shook my world."

Intellectual Things, his first volume of poetry, was published the year he turned 25, but Kunitz took a detour through other jobs — newspaperman, farmer, freelancer, editor — before returning to academic life, in part thanks to fellow poet Theodore Roethke.

The two poets met in the late 1930s, before Roethke accepted a position on the faculty at Penn State. While Kunitz admits he hasn't been back in years, he did visit the campus and has "a very clear picture of the place" in his mind.

Roethke split his time at Penn State with a brief job at Bennington College. He chose Kunitz as his successor when the school urged him to move on to new things.

James Brasfield, senior lecturer in English, studied with Kunitz while earning his MFA at Columbia. He says his former teacher's latest decoration is deserved.

"He is one of our very finest poets," Brasfield said. "Perhaps, his position now will spark critics to think about why so many poets hold him in such high esteem. Public recognition came late to Kunitz. Not until his Selected Poems, published in 1958, was his presence affirmed."

Brasfield said Kunitz's workshop focused on detail and set standards high.

"We all knew that our poems were for us to measure against the timeless poems," he said in an e-mail. "Thus, he was patient and generous. It was that we had a master who had been on the road a long time before us, (and we were) the apprentices just setting out. His mantra is 'transcendence.' 'A poem needs to rise at the end,' he told me once, in conference."

Throughout his lifetime, Kunitz has championed civil liberties and peace movements especially in this country, but now says that the emphasis has shifted.

"The picture has changed a great deal, but the concerns remain the same throughout the whole panoply of nations," he said. "I don't feel that most poets are as passionately concerned because we ourselves as a nation have received our baptism of fire in civil liberties."

For Kunitz, the actual practice of writing poetry hasn't changed much in his lifetime. No computers are necessary for this poet, born only a decade or so after the perfection of the light bulb.

"I use a battered old typewriter, always have," he said. "I like the physical contact of it." And his first drafts are still scrawled out by hand.

How does Kunitz view the present and future of his art?

"In some respects, poetry is enjoying an increase in audience and a change that I think is very promising." He sees hope in the influx of minority cultures and the voice of groups not traditionally well represented in the scholastic world.

Kunitz says he has attended poetry slams. Though he thinks of them more as a game than an art form, he admits the performers can only be respected:

"The skill and the feats of memory and spontaneity are extraordinary."

Besides writing, Kunitz enjoys cultivating a garden at his home in Cape Cod.

In addition to befriending contemporary poets over the years, he knew visual artists such as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. And his wife of over 40 years is painter Elise Asher. During the winter, they live in Greenwich Village, in New York City.

Walking around the streets of his summer neighborhood, his fame still catches up with him: "I'm a familiar figure and Provincetown is a small place."

He has lived long enough to see acquaintances such as Roethke pass away, but Kunitz's workload hasn't let up too much over the years. Another book of his verse is due out in the fall. He will be poet laureate through next spring.