Books Quote by Edward Hirsch

A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.

— Louise Rosenblatt

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course…

— T. S. Eliot

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what…

— Dana Gioia

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

— Salvatore Quasimodo

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of…

— Edward Hirsch

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that…

— Seamus Heaney

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…

— Edward Hirsch

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude…

— Joseph Brodsky

“When I write poetry, I’ll write it down, or a tiny bit of it, and then have to depend on the reader to bring…

— William Anderson

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of…

— Vernon Lee

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

— Anonymous

“A true poet writes from the language and experiences of their own heart, not those of others.”

— Suzy Kassem