The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the inevitability of pain and suffering as part of the human experience.
Stanley Kunitz reflects on the nature of the heart, suggesting that it endures through repeated heartbreaks, which are essential for personal growth and resilience. Emphasizing the importance of facing darkness, he asserts that experiencing deeper struggles ultimately contributes to the richness of life and the strength required to live fully.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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 gratitiude for the gift of life.
Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.
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.
The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
Littera scripta manet - 'The written word will remain'. That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.
Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.
The heart is like a mirror. When we dust it off, we are able to see ourselves. The dust is all our stuff - guilt, anger - this stuff is reflected back to us. Practice removes the dust from the mirror of our hearts.
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.
My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.
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