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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
Ones
Suffering
Dream
Expelled
Stills
Permitted
Still
Exile
Suffer
Perfection
Garden
More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
End with an image and don't explain.
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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
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
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
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
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
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz
In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
