Top 100 Edward Hirsch Quotes
#1. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#5. Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.
Edward Hirsch
#6. There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
Edward Hirsch
#7. 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
#8. The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.
Edward Hirsch
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#12. 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
#13. The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.
Edward Hirsch
#14. Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.
Edward Hirsch
#15. A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.
Edward Hirsch
#16. 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
#17. Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God.
Edward Hirsch
#21. 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
#22. There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#23. Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#24. I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.
Edward Hirsch
#25. 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
#26. Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
Edward Hirsch
#30. When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.
Edward Hirsch
#31. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#32. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#33. I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
Edward Hirsch
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.
Edward Hirsch
#37. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#38. 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
#39. Despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.
Edward Hirsch
#40. You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I just think that limits the kinds of experiences that people can have with poetry. But, poetry will survive; I don't worry about that. But, I do think that it may save fewer souls if people can't pay attention.
Edward Hirsch
#47. There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.
Edward Hirsch
#48. I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
Edward Hirsch
#49. 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
#50. Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.
Edward Hirsch
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.
Edward Hirsch
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.
Edward Hirsch
#60. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#61. It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.
Edward Hirsch
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. She herself feels unequal to the world's sufferings and fears that by narrowing her focus on the world to make it manageable, she has trivialized it.
Edward Hirsch
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#70. I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#71. And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.
Edward Hirsch
#72. The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#73. I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.
Edward Hirsch
#74. 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
#75. A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
#76. 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
#77. Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.
Edward Hirsch
#78. 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
#79. Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.
Edward Hirsch
#80. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#81. 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
#82. I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
#83. The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.
Edward Hirsch
#84. 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
#85. So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
Edward Hirsch
#86. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#87. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
Edward Hirsch
#92. I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
Edward Hirsch
#93. You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.
Edward Hirsch
#94. The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.
Edward Hirsch
#95. Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.
Edward Hirsch
#96. I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
Edward Hirsch
#97. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#98. The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.
Edward Hirsch
#99. 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.
Edward Hirsch
#100. I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
Edward Hirsch
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