Edward Hirsch Quotes

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.

Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.