Edward Hirsch Quotes

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

Art should be life. It's an imitation of life. It should have some humanity in it.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying