287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

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.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

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.

The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

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.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.