Top 35 Edward Hirsch Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I read a lot as a kid and in high school.

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

There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don’t think there is any finding of God.

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

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.

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

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

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.

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

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

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

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It’s absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

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.

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.

It’s very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.