Edward Hirsch

I read a lot as a kid and in high school.

— Edward Hirsch

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

— Edward Hirsch

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

— Edward Hirsch

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

— Edward Hirsch

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.

— 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

“am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation”),”

— Edward Hirsch

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble…

— Edward Hirsch

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

— Edward Hirsch

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.

— Edward Hirsch

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

— Edward Hirsch

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things…

— Edward Hirsch

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that…

— Edward Hirsch

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there…

— Edward Hirsch

“Like a spear hurtling through darkness He was always in such a hurry To find a target to stop him Like a…

— Edward Hirsch

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor,…

— Edward Hirsch

The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious…

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation,…

— Edward Hirsch

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because…

— Edward Hirsch

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from…

— Edward Hirsch

I would say there are different kinds of poems. There are things that poets in the history of poetry hit upon when…

— Edward Hirsch

“When Ungaretti lost his nine-year-old boy He understood that death is death In an extremely brutal way It was the most terrible…

— Edward Hirsch

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you…

— Edward Hirsch

“Grief broke down in phrases And extrapolated lines From me without myself Tear-stained pillow of stone I felt I was lying Beside…

— Edward Hirsch

One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone…

— Edward Hirsch

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things…

— Edward Hirsch

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish…

— Edward Hirsch

“I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop…

— Edward Hirsch

“Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything For his art he dedicated himself To the Great Work I admired his single-mindedness All through my…

— Edward Hirsch

“A Partial History of My Stupidity Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge and I took the road to the right, the…

— Edward Hirsch

“I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop…

— Edward Hirsch

“The population of his feelings Could not be governed By the authorities He had reasons why Reason disobeyed him And voted him…

— Edward Hirsch

“The evening with its lamps burning The night with its head in its hands The early morning I look back at the…

— Edward Hirsch

“Fall" Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season Changes its tense in the long-haired maples That dot the road; the veiny…

— Edward Hirsch

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch