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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
Still
Exile
Suffer
Perfection
Garden
Ones
Suffering
Dream
Expelled
Stills
Permitted

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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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 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.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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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.
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My mother never forgave my father
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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