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Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

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
Poem
Poetry
Enemy

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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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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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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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My mother never forgave my father
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
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I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits they do not come to coo.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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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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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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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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