Edward Hirsch quotes

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Reading #Adventure #Creative

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

#Speech #Different #Use

A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Basketball #Kissing #Men

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

#Giving #Religion #Doe

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

#School #Society #Able

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

#Reading #Intellectual #Junk

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

#Education #School #People

Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency
-- Edward Hirsch

#Book #Knowledge #Consistency

In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love--a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital and thus inevitably thwarted, illicit, adulterous. One of the medieval terms for it was amour honestus (honest love). I've always wondered why this passionate ideal--masochistic, spiritual-travelled with such wildfire throughout Europe. My poem, a ghazal, takes up the subject.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Spiritual #Passion #Europe

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Poetry #Essentials #Needs

The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Art #Justice #Want

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Expectations #Boredom #Inspire

I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Ocean #Sound #Body

...I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss...
-- Edward Hirsch

#Healing #Loss #Brotherhood

I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Wind #Tree #Needs

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Art #Source #Process

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Fall #Home #Autumn

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Morning #Distance #Sleep

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
-- Edward Hirsch

#Dark #Mourning #Labor

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Keys #Aztec #Sage

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

#Art #Blood #Hands

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Art #Space #Giving

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
-- Edward Hirsch

#Poet #Reader #Great Poet