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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
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Comedy
Underworld
Help
Guide
Helping
Calls
Great
Guides
Way
Model
Models
Virgil
Beginning
Dante
Divine
Inferno

More quotes by Edward Hirsch

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I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
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I would say there are different kinds of poems. There are things that poets in the history of poetry hit upon when they're very young that can never be outdone and it's a remarkable, strange experience when you think of say Arthur Rimbaud who write poetry between the ages of 17 and 21 whose career was over by the time he was 22.
Edward Hirsch
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We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.
Edward Hirsch
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think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
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Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
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One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.
Edward Hirsch
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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
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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
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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
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When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.
Edward Hirsch
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Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
Edward Hirsch
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Gertrude Stein said, I write for myself and strangers. I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
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I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.
Edward Hirsch
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A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
Edward Hirsch
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I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.
Edward Hirsch
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There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
Edward Hirsch
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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