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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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
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Person
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Tasks
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Create
More quotes by Stanley Kunitz
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
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
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
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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
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
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
An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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
Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
Stanley Kunitz
