Reflections of a Poet

By: Stanley Kunitz

"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains..." -- Walt Whitman

Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole—that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.

At the core of one’s existence is a pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe. Man has only a bit part to play in the whole marvelous show of creation.

Poems would be easy if our heads weren’t full of the day’s clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides.

I keep trying to improve my control over language, so that I won’t have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.

Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe once or twice in a lifetime we’ve heard and keep trying to recall.

I like to think that it is the poet’s love of particulars, the things of this world, that leads him to universals.

A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is the function of form.

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.

Sometimes I feel ashamed that I’ve written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action.

There’s always a song lying under the surface of my poems. The struggle is between incantation and sense. Incantation wants to take over. It really doesn’t need a language: all it needs is sounds. The sense has to struggle to assert itself, to mount the rhythm and become inseparable from it.

In his eighty-seventh year, Miró told an interviewer that he felt closest to “the young—all the young generations.” From childhood to age, he ruminated, “I have always lived a very intense life, almost like a monk, an austere life. It comes out in little leaves, floating about, dispersing themselves. But the trunk of the tree and the branches remain solid.”

Yes, he admitted, his style had changed—changed several times, in fact, during his long life. But these changes did not imply a rejection of what he had done before.

Looking back, he could see a continuity in the essence of his work, which is nourished at every stage “by all of my past, the great human past. And what looks like a zig-zag is really a straight line.”

At my age, after you’re done—or ruefully think you’re done—with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. 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.

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You can find this prose poem in Kunitz’s — The Collected Poems

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