Quotes from Edward Hirsch

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

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

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

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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