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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
Keep
Forty
Part
Africa
Needs
Requires
Never
Remain
Awareness
Poet
Tamed
Inside
Darkest
Alive
Wilderness
More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
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.
Stanley Kunitz
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
Stanley Kunitz
It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
...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.
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
Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
