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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

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
Secrets
Poem
Poet
Secret
Nothing

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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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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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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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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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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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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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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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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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz