Edward Hirsch quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edward Hirsch on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The same soul never steps into the river twice.

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.

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.

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

The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.

Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.

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

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

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

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

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

We can only understand what we can name.

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.

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.

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.

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

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I keep scraping the canvas
And painting him over again
But he keeps slipping away

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets.

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

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely. Eventually,

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.

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

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

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

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

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

As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.

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

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

I wish I could believe in the otherworld I wish I could believe in a place Of reunions outside of memory

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

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

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

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

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

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.

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.

I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.

All that rescues us is love.

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.

You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.

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

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.

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

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.