Quotes from Edward Hirsch

Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.

despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. "Probably

We can only understand what we can name.

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.

He tried to escape he could not Cut the binding cord of human love [...] Sweet venom His arrivals were swift And his departures sudden I couldn't understand how He lifted the shower door Right off its hinges [...] Love you he coughed and kissed me See you next week he was out The door like a thousand other times [...] Most reckless of reckless angels

Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward but resolute path.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation")

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.

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

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

For all the insomniacs of the world I want to build a new kind of machine For flying out of the body at night. This will win peace prizes, I know it, But I can't do it myself; I'm exhausted, I need help from the inventors.

Poetry exists in a relationship so that it can speak to your interior life. That's why I believe that reading is relationship." —Edward Hirsch

I don't think that we should underestimate the capacity of tenderness that poetry opens within us.

Around us even as its colorful weather moves us, Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets. And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us. ""Fall