Author Profile
Edward Hirsch
1950 • American • Poet
18
Total Quotes
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Collected Meditations
Showing 18 quotesPoetry 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
topics:
Poetry
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
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
topics:
Poetry
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
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
topics:
Poetry
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
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
topics:
Poetry
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
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry
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
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Poetry
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
topics:
Poetry
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.— Edward Hirsch
topics:
Poetry