Edward Hirsch

The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry..it paces the poem.

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized.

— Edward Hirsch

Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution , a perception.

— Edward Hirsch

There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration.

— Edward Hirsch

For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds.

— Edward Hirsch

The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is reading and recitation: participation.

— Edward Hirsch

The poet creates it; the people by recitation recreate it. Poet and reader (hearer) are moments of the same reality.

— Edward Hirsch

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said.

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a form of necessary speech.

— Edward Hirsch

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

— Edward Hirsch