Edward Hirsch Art Quotations

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

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

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

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

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.

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

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

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.