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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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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Hopkins
Essentially
Rhythm
Taste
Called
Self

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My mother never forgave my father
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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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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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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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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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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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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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.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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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.
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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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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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