Guess quote

Edward Hirsch [1950-0] American

Rank: 102
Poet

Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker calls “a masterpiece of sorrow.”

Poetry, Courage

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.	Poetry	101
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.	Poetry	102
One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you.		103
The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.		104
There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.	Poetry	105
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.	Poetry	106
The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.		107
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.		108
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.	Courage	109
As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.		110
I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief.		111
Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.		112
Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.		113
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.		114
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.		115
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.		116
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.		117
When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.		118
A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.		119
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.		120
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.		121
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.		122
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.		123
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.		124
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.		125
The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.		126
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.		201
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.		202
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.		203
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.		204
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.		205
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.		206
As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.		207
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.		208
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.		209
There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.		210
You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.		211
As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.		212
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.		213
Life has to have the plenitude of art.		214
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.		215
Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.		216
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.		217
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.		218
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.		219
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.		220
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.		221
It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.		222
You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.		223
My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.		224
There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God.		225
Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.		226
I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.		301
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.		302
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.		303
Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.		304
I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.		305
The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.		306
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.		307
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.		308
I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.		309
I read a lot as a kid and in high school.		310
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.		311
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.		312
Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.		313
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.		314
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.		315
I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.		316
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.		317
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.		318
James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.		319
I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.		320
I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.		321
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.		322
'Liberty Brass' is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression.		323
Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.		324
Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.		325
Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.		326

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