Edward Hirsch Quotes

I've written poetry most of my life.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

I read poetry to save time.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

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.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.