Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Jasspon Kunitzwas an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 July 1905
CityWorcester, MA
art morality endure
The supreme morality of art is to endure.
suicide sweet art
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.
beautiful dream art
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.
art book moon
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
dream art writing
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.
art thinking expression
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.
american-poet bottom heroes represent sleeping waiting wisdom
Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
dart eyes single sound sudden
A single glance: a sudden dart of painstitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
begins life scarcely till wait
I can scarcely wait till tomorrowwhen a new life begins for me,as it does each day,as it does each way.
needs alive awareness
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.
men who-i-am remember
Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
mars mail
Forward my mail to Mars.
mother father
My mother never forgave my father
joy survival surviving
I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.