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...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Stanley Kunitz
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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Poet
Cold
Testing
Tell
Poems
Young
Poets
Writing
Page
Bed
Ears
Pages
More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
Stanley Kunitz
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
Stanley Kunitz
Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
Stanley Kunitz
A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
Stanley Kunitz
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
Stanley Kunitz
Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.
Stanley Kunitz
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgave my father
Stanley Kunitz
I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
Stanley Kunitz
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
