Quote

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

Stanley Kunitz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

Image
A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
My mother never forgave my father
Stanley Kunitz
Image
The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
Forward my mail to Mars.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
Image
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