Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.

— Stanley Kunitz

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look…

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know…

— Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of…

— Stanley Kunitz

When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we…

— Stanley Kunitz

“When, on your dangerous mission gone, You underrate our foes as dunces, Be wary, not of sudden gun, But of your partner…

— Stanley Kunitz

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest…

— Stanley Kunitz

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to…

— Stanley Kunitz

“Miss Murphy in first grade wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the storm…

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz

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

— Stanley Kunitz