Quotes by Edward Hirsch

“I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.”

“I'm so happy to be an advocate for 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 a...”

“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...”

“Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.”

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

“Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.”

“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 last...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 ...”

“There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.”

“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.”

“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 th...”

“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...”

“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.”