Edward Hirsch Quotes

I like poems that are complex.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

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.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

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.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.