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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.
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
Poet
Tamed
Inside
Darkest
Alive
Wilderness
Keep
Forty
Part
Africa
Needs
Requires
Never
Remain
Awareness
More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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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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My mother never forgave my father
Stanley Kunitz
An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz
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.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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 heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
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
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
