287 Quotes by Edward Hirsch

Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

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.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

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.

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.