How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry Quotes

“Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, “leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader.”
― Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

“Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. “Probably”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“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, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.”
― Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

“despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“We can only understand what we can name.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation”),”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche’s maxim, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo,” the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bashō, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bashō’s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, “The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“I don't think that we should underestimate the capacity of tenderness that poetry opens within us.”
― Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

“Poetry is a form of necessary speech.”
― Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

“Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.   Eventually,”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“She herself feels unequal to the world’s sufferings and fears that by narrowing her focus on the world to make it manageable, she has trivialized it.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“There is an enormous abyss between subject and object.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“The poet of Whit-manesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose taking things away.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets.”
― Edward Hirsch, How To Read A Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry