Nine Gates Quotes

“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“Robinson Jeffers longed throughout his life ]for a poetry of 'pure undoubtable being'], but could not bear to relinquish his moral connection with the humanity he continually condemned for its self-centeredness.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“Yūgen's hallmarks [are] mystery and depth .. . . it is characterized by sadness, unspoken connotations, imagery of a veiled, monochromatic nature, and an atmosphere of haunting beauty.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R. P. Blackmur said.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“In the poems of . . . Robinson Jeffers, it is a style of consciousness rather than of language we see most in an altered light, some shadowed corner of experience newly illumined and made perceptible by words.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

“Free verse follows 'the breath of a thought where it leads'.”
― Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry