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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
Self
Hopkins
Essentially
Rhythm
Taste
Called

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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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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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Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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 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.
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
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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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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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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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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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