287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn’t writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

It’s hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written “The Tempest” when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn’t start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I’ve written, say one sentence sonnets, I’ve been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I’ve written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you’re looking for.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves.

I think poetry will survive and I don’t think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we’re suffering and we don’t really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don’t. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

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.

You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it’s well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that’s not up to you.