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
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.
There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.