Edward Hirsch Quotes

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.

I really hesitate to say that any of my shows influenced other writers.

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.

Don't make art for other artists or for 'intellectuals', make art for people - and if you can touch just one person in a lifetime and make a difference - you have succeeded.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

That's what I love about songwriting - that you can write something about your own experiences and think it's completely specific to you, and then people can take away a completely different meaning for themselves. I really love that. I think you've been successful at writing a song when it has a larger life than yourself.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

I think you have a responsibility as an artist to continually reach a hand out and try and inspire people.

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

I guess that storytelling would be for me to keep making art that touches people in a way that nothing else can.

We must listen to poets.