Best quotes by Edward Hirsch on Poetry

Checkout quotes by Edward Hirsch on Poetry

• ‟ I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

  - Edward Hirsch
  

• ‟ Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

  - Edward Hirsch