Quote

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

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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
Perfection
Prescriptions
Worth
Disciplined
Vision
Visions
Talking
Suspect
Need
Suspects
Needs
Sinner
Work
Effective
Noted
Saint
Prescription

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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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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.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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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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Forward my mail to Mars.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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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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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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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
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