That's true, Eric, and Stanley and Roethke were close friends and poetic comrades, too. It's interesting to feel how different the position of the speakers is in these two poems. "The Portrait," despite that stinging slap at the end, is relatively calm in its method of narration, reporting an experience that reverberates throughout the speaker's life. The Roethke poem has that galumphing, insistent rhythm that seems to put us inside the small boy's body, less in control than Kunitz is.

I'm always curious how much this is a formal choice (the poet selecting a technique that's appropriate to the material at hand) and how much it's a function of character, an expression of a way of seeing the world.