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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
Exile
Still
Suffer
Perfection
Garden
Ones
Suffering
Expelled
Dream
Permitted
Stills

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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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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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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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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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End with an image and don't explain.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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...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 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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