A Quote by Stanley Kunitz

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. — © Stanley Kunitz
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems.
There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
My poems are certainly in the lyric tradition, but perhaps a reader can tell me more precisely who I am as a poet. How can I be so old and not know? I have always been deeply grateful for the urge to write, the desire to create, that's certain. Writing has always been the way I make sense of life. Perhaps my poems define me, rather than the other way around. They do constantly surprise me.
We write to understand our deepest secrets to ourselves, to understand. We write in an outpouring of love. We write in secret, either for publication or for a journal no one will see, or we write poems to be privately printed for the eyes of friends alone - this is not our choice. The urge is to create. The outcome belongs to God.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.
I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
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