Stanley Kunitz Quotes

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.

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.

How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?

I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose.

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

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.

In a murderous time/the heart breaks and breaks/and lives by breaking.

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.

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.

The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.

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

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.

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.

Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.

...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.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.

I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.

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.

The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.

Forward my mail to Mars.

My mother never forgave my father

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.

You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.

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.

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.

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.

End with an image and don't explain.

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.