Quote

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Edward Hirsch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Words
Medium
Language
Mediums
Use
Property
Nature
Products
Ends
Speech
Circulates
Different
Thousand
Soiled
Public
Impure
Society
Uses

More quotes by Edward Hirsch

Image
The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.
Edward Hirsch
Image
That you write a phrase or you think of something and it seems to have a deeper charge because the title has to be some kind of marker, something setting out a space, creating a space for what's going to come.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.
Edward Hirsch
Image
There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch
Image
Books and newspapers assume a common reader that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency
Edward Hirsch
Image
Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
Edward Hirsch
Image
A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.
Edward Hirsch
Image
A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
Image
So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.
Edward Hirsch
Image
There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
Edward Hirsch
Image
It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
Image
And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.
Edward Hirsch
Image
The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch