Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Stanley Kunitz (American Poet)

Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (1905–2006) was an American Pulitzer-winning poet. He is noted for his intellectual verse chiefly inspired by the seventeenth-century English Metaphysical poems and his treatment of complex themes. He published for three-quarters of a century.

Born to parents of Jewish Russian-Lithuanian descent in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kunitz attended Harvard University, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1926 and an M.A. in 1927. He taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York City (1950–57) and Columbia University (1963–85.)

Kunitz’s first collection of verse was Intellectual Things (1930;) it was followed by Passport to the War (1944.) Selected Poems 1928–58 was awarded a Pulitzer in 1959. Subsequent books include The Testing-Tree (1971,) The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems 1940–70 (1974,) and Passing Through (1995.)

Kunitz also edited studies on William Blake and John Keats, published literary anthologies and reference books, and translated several Russian poetry volumes, including poems by Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. His Collected Poems appeared in 2000.

Kunitz was twice a consultant in poetry (now Poet Laureate Consultant in poetry) to the Library of Congress 1974–1976 and 2000–2001. His reference works include American Authors 1600–1900 (1938; with Howard Haycraft.)

Gregory Orr wrote Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Stanley Kunitz

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

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.
Stanley Kunitz

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

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.
Stanley Kunitz

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.
Stanley Kunitz

The thing that eats the heart is mostly the heart.
Stanley Kunitz

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 gratitude for the gift of life.
Stanley Kunitz

The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.
Stanley Kunitz

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