287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

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.”

I don’t think you can read poetry while you’re watching television very well.

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.

We can only understand what we can name.

So, the result though is by the time I’ve got something, it’s been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I’ve gotten it, it’s pretty much completed.

So, it’s a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

Now, I do say, “It’s possible. You might be the first. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are very much against you.” All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, “That’s so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather’s poem.”

We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.