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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
Writing
Page
Bed
Ears
Pages
Poet
Cold
Testing
Tell
Poems
Young
Poets

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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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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.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz