Quote

...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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Ears
Pages
Poet
Cold
Testing
Tell
Poems
Young
Poets
Writing
Page
Bed

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

Image
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Forward my mail to Mars.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: Live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz