Edward Hirsch Quotes

Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem , a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City. Wikipedia

✵ 20. January 1950

Edward Hirsch photo

Michael Lionstar, Photosubmission 2014110610020143 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Edward Hirsch: 11 quotes0 likes

Famous Edward Hirsch Quotes

“The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is reading and recitation: participation.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“Poetry is a form of necessary speech.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry.. it paces the poem.”

'Five points' vol 4 no 2 Georgia State University Press Winter 2000

“These ruinous days of Autumn. At dusk,
the brightness seeps through the crumbling air,
at dusk the air gathers up the brightness”

'The Renunciation of Poetry'

“There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

Edward Hirsch Quotes

“The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“I was never able to pray
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves.”

'I was never able to pray'

“For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)

“The poet creates it; the people by recitation recreate it. Poet and reader (hearer) are moments of the same reality.”

How to Read a Poem And Fall in Love with Poetry (1998)