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Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

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
Language
Surprised
Changing
Meaning
Poetry

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
Stanley Kunitz
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
Stanley Kunitz
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I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
Stanley Kunitz
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
Stanley Kunitz
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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.
Stanley Kunitz
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
Stanley Kunitz
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
Stanley Kunitz
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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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
Stanley Kunitz
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
Stanley Kunitz
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanley Kunitz
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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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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
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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.
Stanley Kunitz
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
Stanley Kunitz
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
Stanley Kunitz