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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.

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
Suffer
Perfection
Garden
Ones
Suffering
Dream
Expelled
Stills
Permitted
Still
Exile

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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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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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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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.
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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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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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My mother never forgave my father
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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