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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
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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
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Chicago
Illinois
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Virgil
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More quotes by Edward Hirsch
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
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
The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.
Edward Hirsch
I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.
Edward Hirsch
I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
Edward Hirsch
I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.
Edward Hirsch
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
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
Edward Hirsch
Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.
Edward Hirsch
In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
Edward Hirsch
That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
Gertrude Stein said, I write for myself and strangers. I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.
Edward Hirsch
And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.
Edward Hirsch
There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the Sleepwalkers, I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
Edward Hirsch
A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.
Edward Hirsch