Stanley Kunitz Quotes
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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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End with an image and don't explain.
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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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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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The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.
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How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?
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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.
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Live in the layers, not on the litter.
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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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Be what you are. Give What is yours to give. Have Style. Dare.
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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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The unconscious creates, the ego edits.
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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.
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A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.
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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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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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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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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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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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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.
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What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.
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The supreme morality of art is to endure.
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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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My mother never forgave my father
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The ear writes my poems, not the mind.
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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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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.
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Memory is each man's poet-in-residence.
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