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The supreme morality of art is to endure.

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
Supreme
Endure
Morality
Art

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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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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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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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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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Forward my mail to Mars.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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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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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 today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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My mother never forgave my father
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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.
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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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...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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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
Stanley Kunitz