Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirschis 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 calls “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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 January 1950
CountryUnited States of America
I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.
Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.
As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.
As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.
There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.
The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.
The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.