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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.

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
Many
Abides
Stray
Walked
Principle
Principles
Struggle
Though
Lives

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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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
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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
Stanley Kunitz
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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.
Stanley Kunitz
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz