211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being.

The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth – for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine’s Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Chicago, Seamus Heaney’s time-tunneled, familied Ireland.

The nourishment of Cezanne’s awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

A poem’s essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

Poetry’s work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving.

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature’s windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.

Age in itself gives substance – what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem’s increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.