Edward Hirsch

“I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief.”

“Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.”

“Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.”

“The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.”

“Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.”

“I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.”

“I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.”

“Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.”

“I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.”

“Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.”

“My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.”

“You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.”

“You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.”

“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.”

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

“The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.”

“The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.”

“I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.”

“Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.”

“One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you.”