What is the author's style in The War Against the Trees by Stanley Kunitz?

"The War Against the Trees" consists of a total of thirty lines organized into five stanzas of six lines each. In each stanza, at least two lines rhyme. Rhyme is always masculine, that is, monosyllabic, as in show/row, town/down, and scars/cars. These rhyming lines are further unified by having approximately the same number of syllables and accents, and generally, the same rhythm, either iambic tetrameter or pentameter. Finally, these lines are united by their appearance on the page, by extending farther than the stanza's other lines. Together, these similarities constitute a "major pair." In addition to the major pairs, there are also minor pairs, "minor" because if the lines rhyme, as in lines 1 and 4 (oil/soil), they do not share the same number of syllables. The rhyme in the minor pairs is sometimes a form of off-rhyme or assonance, as in stanza two's "raids" / "maimed" / "again."

By assigning human attributes to inanimate things, Kunitz personifies both technology, as in the bulldozers, and nature, as in the trees and plants. The nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin took a dim view of making human the inhuman and termed this literary device "pathetic fallacy." Ruskin believed the primary criterion of art and literature is truth, and saw in personification a form of literally lying about the appearance of things. Ruskin's criticism, however, is dismissed by many, and the use of personification, in all genres of literature, continues.