Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Ends
Summer
Beating
Writing
Behinds
Celebration
Think
Behind
Ran
Thinking
Started
Poem
Like
Sound
Eventually
Hoe
Write
Wild
Geese
House
Began
Flew
Left
Wings
Dropped

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

Image
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Forward my mail to Mars.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
My mother never forgave my father
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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