Top 100 Edward Hirsch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it’s sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.”

— Edward Hirsch

2. “A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.”

— Edward Hirsch

3. “There’s never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there’s language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

4. “A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of The Inferno, The Divine Comedy, to help guide him through the underworld.”

— Edward Hirsch

5. “So, it’s a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.”

— Edward Hirsch

6. “I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.”

— Edward Hirsch

7. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

8. “Now, I do say, “It’s possible. You might be the first. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are very much against you.” All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.”

— Edward Hirsch

9. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

10. “Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.”

— Edward Hirsch

11. “Gertrude Stein said, “I write for myself and strangers.” I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.”

— Edward Hirsch

12. “There’s been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn’t also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.”

— Edward Hirsch

13. “I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they’re generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.”

— Edward Hirsch

14. “Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.”

— Edward Hirsch

15. “The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.”

— Edward Hirsch

16. “The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader and that meaning doesn’t exist or in here in poems alone.”

— Edward Hirsch

17. “Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can’t get rid of. Sometimes there’s an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.”

— Edward Hirsch

18. “Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same.”

— Edward Hirsch

19. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

20. “The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.”

— Edward Hirsch

21. “It’s not important – it’s not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.”

— Edward Hirsch

22. “Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of – their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.”

— Edward Hirsch

23. “There’s the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.”

— Edward Hirsch

24. “And when my second book had come out, “Wild Gratitude,” I went to Pearl London’s class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.”

— Edward Hirsch

25. “It’s hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written “The Tempest” when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.”

— Edward Hirsch

26. “The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.”

— Edward Hirsch

27. “The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can’t have one without the other.”

— Edward Hirsch

28. “Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.”

— Edward Hirsch

29. “I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.”

— Edward Hirsch

30. “We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.”

— Edward Hirsch

31. “Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.”

— Edward Hirsch

32. “I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves.”

— Edward Hirsch

33. “So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I’ve written, say one sentence sonnets, I’ve been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I’ve written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you’re looking for.”

— Edward Hirsch

34. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

35. “Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.”

— Edward Hirsch

36. “The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you’re – when things are going poorly, when you’re not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can’t make the connections.”

— Edward Hirsch

37. “When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.”

— Edward Hirsch

38. “You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it’s well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that’s not up to you.”

— Edward Hirsch

39. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

40. “But, that was the beginning, though I didn’t start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.”

— Edward Hirsch

41. “One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I’m writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

42. “Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”

— Edward Hirsch

43. “And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you’re a child. It’s not only a joyous wonder, it’s sometimes a grief stricken wonder.”

— Edward Hirsch

44. “In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, “That’s so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather’s poem.””

— Edward Hirsch

45. “I think poetry will survive and I don’t think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we’re suffering and we don’t really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.”

— Edward Hirsch

46. “Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.”

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch

48. “The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

49. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

50. “A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it’s a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch