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
A person who’s only suffering can’t write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. – Edward Hirsch
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. – Edward Hirsch
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. – Edward Hirsch
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
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
When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. – Edward Hirsch
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. – Edward Hirsch
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
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
The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance. – Edward Hirsch
Throughout his work, Philip Levine’s most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted. – Edward Hirsch
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
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. – Edward Hirsch
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
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
Someone who’s awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. – Edward Hirsch
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it’s sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. – Edward Hirsch
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I’ve tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry. – Edward Hirsch
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
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
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
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
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
I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. – Edward Hirsch
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. – Edward Hirsch
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
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. – Edward Hirsch
