Quotes by Edward Hirsch

“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.”

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

“And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the...”

“I did not know the work of mourningIs like carrying a bag of cementUp a mountain at nightThe mountaintop is not in sightBecause there is no mountaintopPoor Sisyphus griefI did not know I would stru...”

“Why did the sun rise this morningIt's not naturalI don't want to see the lightIt's not time to close the casketOr say Kaddish for my sonI've already buried two fathersWith a mother to comeIsn't tha...”

“Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a wh...”

“And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the...”

“The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry..it paces the poem.”

“These ruinous days of Autumn.At dusk,the brightness seeps through the crumbling air,at dusk the air gathers up the brightness”

“I was never able to praybut let me inscribe my namein the book of waves.”

“Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized.”

“Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution , a perception.”

“There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration.”

“For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.”

“The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is reading and recitation: participation.”

“The poet creates it; the people by recitation recreate it. Poet and reader (hearer) are moments of the same reality.”

“The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said.”

“Poetry is a form of necessary speech.”

“Hirsch's poems are compassionate , reverential , sometimes relievingly ruthless.”