287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

There has never been a great poet who wasn’t also a great reader of poetry.

And it was the title August 13th for most of the way and then near the end, sometime in the process, I got the idea that maybe that would be a somewhat bland title and I got the idea for wild gratitude, which I’m very proud of as a title. So, I think it works best when you find it in the process.

I think it’s true that that’s something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

I didn’t sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world’s movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you’re at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. “Probably.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, “They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet.”