287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there’s the wild, exuberance of youth, there’s the painful agony of midlife experience, there’s the late poetry in the presence of death.

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

There’s always some place to go. You don’t need workshops, you don’t need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I’ve got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet’s job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet’s job is to inspire some future reader. And so, as a reader you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages and experiencing what’s in them inside of yourself.

All that rescues us is love.

We’re trying to make something that lasts in language and there’s no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it’s hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don’t also read poetry.

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.

Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of – express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.