Quote

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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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Natural
Write
Art
Luminous
Dream
Spare
Look
Spares
Looks
Transparent
Writing
Poems
World
Deep

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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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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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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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