Top 100 Edward Hirsch Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “That you write a phrase or you think of something and it seems to have a deeper charge because the title has to be some kind of marker, something setting out a space, creating a space for what’s going to come.”

— Edward Hirsch

52. “And Mandelstam says a poet – you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, “It’s okay to do so. I’m not reading someone else’s mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it’s addressed to me.””

— Edward Hirsch

53. “Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.”

— Edward Hirsch

54. “The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.”

— Edward Hirsch

55. “Ultimately you’re trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can’t do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.”

— Edward Hirsch

56. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

57. “And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, “They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet.””

— Edward Hirsch

58. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

59. “I mean, when I was young I could write all through the night and I loved to work late into the night. Now that I’m older I work really well in the early morning when your synapses are firing a little better. But I work at different times of the day.”

— Edward Hirsch

60. “Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region – the register – between speech and song.”

— Edward Hirsch

61. “In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.”

— Edward Hirsch

62. “I think that’s a connection that you can only hope for. It’s not something that you can make because it needs someone else.”

— Edward Hirsch

63. “A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.”

— Edward Hirsch

64. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

65. “I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.”

— Edward Hirsch

66. “I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.”

— Edward Hirsch

67. “It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.”

— Edward Hirsch

68. “I don’t have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

69. “If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?’ But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.”

— Edward Hirsch

70. “The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.”

— Edward Hirsch

71. “We can only understand what we can name.”

— Edward Hirsch

72. “I don’t think you can read poetry while you’re watching television very well.”

— Edward Hirsch

73. “We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.”

— Edward Hirsch

74. “But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it’s because you’re outside the social realm.”

— Edward Hirsch

75. “I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

76. “You’re alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

77. “I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn’t writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.”

— Edward Hirsch

78. “Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against death.”

— Edward Hirsch

79. “And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you’re at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.”

— Edward Hirsch

80. “A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they’re not going to be able to find.”

— Edward Hirsch

81. “I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we’re not writing journalism when we’re making literature.”

— Edward Hirsch

82. “So, the process of revision, it’s not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they’re happier people. But, I’m just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.”

— Edward Hirsch

83. “I was surprised recently to find a book called “Poetry in Persons” that’s coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.”

— Edward Hirsch

84. “I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that’s a bit at risk.”

— Edward Hirsch

85. “I just think that limits the kinds of experiences that people can have with poetry. But, poetry will survive; I don’t worry about that. But, I do think that it may save fewer souls if people can’t pay attention.”

— Edward Hirsch

86. “So, the result though is by the time I’ve got something, it’s been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I’ve gotten it, it’s pretty much completed.”

— Edward Hirsch

87. “I think it’s one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.”

— Edward Hirsch

88. “Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward but resolute path.”

— Edward Hirsch

89. “I think it’s true that that’s something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.”

— Edward Hirsch

90. “And when I’m writing well and when I’m inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.”

— Edward Hirsch

91. “I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.”

— Edward Hirsch

92. “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.”

— Edward Hirsch

93. “When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.”

— Edward Hirsch

94. “Now, as I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.”

— Edward Hirsch

95. “The same soul never steps into the river twice.”

— Edward Hirsch

96. “I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.”

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch

98. “First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.”

— Edward Hirsch

99. “I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don’t. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.”

— Edward Hirsch

100. “I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.”

— Edward Hirsch