Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

I love playing with words and texture.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

I fell in love with rhyming when I turned 13. I was in junior high. I got into it, but I wasn't serious. It was just for fun.