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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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Tasks
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Create
More quotes by 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
Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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
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
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
Stanley Kunitz
Forward my mail to Mars.
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
In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
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
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
Stanley Kunitz
I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz
Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
Stanley Kunitz
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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
