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

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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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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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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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.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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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
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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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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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
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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