Edward Hirsch Quotes

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.

I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.

Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.

As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.

Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.