70 Quotes by Stanley Kunitz

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.

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

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

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.

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

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 unconscious creates, the ego edits.

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

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