Edward Hirsch Art Quotations

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.