Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.

Poets wish to profit or to please.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

A good poem is a contribution to reality.

Poetry is an act of peace.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.

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.

That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life -- but may be a penetration into reality...as expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.