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

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry takes courage because you have to face things, and you try to articulate how you feel.

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

— Edward Hirsch

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.

— Edward Hirsch

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

— 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

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

— Edward Hirsch

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.

— Edward Hirsch