Stanley Kunitz Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

End with an image and don't explain.

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

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

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.