Top 100 Edward Hirsch Quotes
#1. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#2. I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.
Edward Hirsch
#3. 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 ...
Edward Hirsch
#4. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#5. There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
Edward Hirsch
#6. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#7. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#8. Jonson wrote a poem and called his son
His best piece of poetrie
A lovely line a little loathsome
I loved that poem once
He said we are lent our sons never take
Too much pleasure in what you love
Edward Hirsch
#9. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#10. He could never stand still but now
Something that had once been my son
Lay there restless spirit
Who left the house one rainy night
And never returned
Lost boy
Who will never be found again
Anywhere but eternity
Edward Hirsch
#11. One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
Edward Hirsch
#12. Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.
Edward Hirsch
#13. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#14. I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
Edward Hirsch
#15. The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.
Edward Hirsch
#16. I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
Edward Hirsch
#17. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#18. When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.
Edward Hirsch
#19. I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.
Edward Hirsch
#20. Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him
Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder
Edward Hirsch
#21. There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
Edward Hirsch
#22. Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
#23. Despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.
Edward Hirsch
#24. As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.
Edward Hirsch
#25. Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#26. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#27. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#28. I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
Edward Hirsch
#29. Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch
#30. Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.
Edward Hirsch
#31. Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#32. 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."
Edward Hirsch
#33. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#34. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#35. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#36. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#37. In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
#38. And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.
Edward Hirsch
#39. I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
#40. Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.
Edward Hirsch
#41. I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.
Edward Hirsch
#42. In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#43. The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
Edward Hirsch
#44. The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
Edward Hirsch
#45. It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.
Edward Hirsch
#46. Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets.
Edward Hirsch
#47. Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
Edward Hirsch
#48. 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."
Edward Hirsch
#49. I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk.
Edward Hirsch
#51. I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.
Edward Hirsch
#52. As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.
Edward Hirsch
#53. You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.
Edward Hirsch
#54. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#55. I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.
Edward Hirsch
#57. When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#58. I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.
Edward Hirsch
#59. Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.
Edward Hirsch
#60. 'Liberty Brass' is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression.
Edward Hirsch
#61. The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.
Edward Hirsch
#62. We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#63. A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#64. I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
Edward Hirsch
#65. I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#66. Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
Edward Hirsch
#68. Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.
Edward Hirsch
#69. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#70. Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
Edward Hirsch
#71. Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.
Edward Hirsch
#72. I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore
and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.
Edward Hirsch
#73. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#74. I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.
Edward Hirsch
#75. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#76. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#77. We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.
Edward Hirsch
#78. Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.
Edward Hirsch
#79. One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#80. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#81. I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
Edward Hirsch
#82. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#83. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#84. Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.
Edward Hirsch
#85. If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, 'You're out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?' But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.
Edward Hirsch
#86. Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency
Edward Hirsch
#87. And it was the title August 13th for most of the way and then near the end, sometime in the process, I got the idea that maybe that would be a somewhat bland title and I got the idea for wild gratitude, which I'm very proud of as a title. So, I think it works best when you find it in the process.
Edward Hirsch
#88. Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.
Edward Hirsch
#89. Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
Edward Hirsch
#90. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#91. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#92. I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
Edward Hirsch
#93. There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely. Eventually,
Edward Hirsch
#94. Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.
Edward Hirsch
#95. Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.
Edward Hirsch
#96. A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
Edward Hirsch
#97. That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
Edward Hirsch
#98. Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
Edward Hirsch
#99. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#100. 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.
Edward Hirsch
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