POET

Edward Hirsch (1950 - )

BIOGRAPHY

"I would like to speak in my poems with what the Romantic poets called 'the true voice of feeling,'" Edward Hirsch once told Contemporary Authors. "I believe, as Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry, 'only emotion endures.'" Described by Peter Stitt in Poetry as "a poet of genuine talent and feeling," Hirsch has been highly acclaimed for his poetry collections, For the Sleepwalkers and Wild Gratitude. For the Sleepwalkers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981, and Wild Gratitude won the award in 1987. The two books contain vignettes of urban life and numerous tributes to artists, which, according to David Wojahn in the New York Times Book Review, "begin as troubled meditations on human suffering [but] end in celebration." New Republic contributor Jay Parini wrote that in For the Sleepwalkers, "Hirsch inhabits, poem by poem, dozens of other skins. He can become Rimbaud, Rilke, Paul Klee, or Matisse, in each case convincingly." "I admire Edward Hirsch," declared Phoebe Pettingell in the New Leader, "for his mystical vision, for the mastery he has . . . attained—and for his daring."

While many reviewers have applauded Hirsch's poetry, declaring that it exhibits tenderness, intelligence, and musicality that goes beyond mere technique, they have also recognized in his highly rhetorical style the propensity to "cross the borderline between effectiveness and excess," as Stitt asserted. For instance, Wojahn maintained that "Hirsch's tenderness [in Wild Gratitude] sometimes threatens to become merely ingratiating," and Hugh Seidman, in a New York Times Book Review article, thought that Hirsch's first work, For the Sleepwalkers, is "a poetry of narcissistic invention employing exaggerated tone and metaphor," an excess that Seidman believed is typical of much contemporary American poetry. Nevertheless, Parini insisted that Hirsch's poems "easily fulfill Auden's request that poems be, above all else, 'memorable language,'" and Carolyn Kizer declared in the Washington Post Book World that Hirsch's "great strength lies in his descriptive powers." As Hirsch "learns to administer with lighter touch his considerable linguistic fertility," claimed Stitt, "he will surely grow into one of the important writers of our age."

The poems in Hirsch's third book, The Night Parade, continue with themes presented in his first two works, but stray from his stylistic and formal techniques, perhaps indicating a transitional period. Hirsch told CA: "Many of these poems are more meditative and narrative, linking the personal to the historical, contemplating the nature of family stories and expanding outward from there to consider the history and development of Chicago as a city." He added, "The passionate clarity of [my] style has not always met with critical approval." In the New York Times Book Review, Stephen Dobyns remarked, "Despite several marvelous poems, The Night Parade doesn't seem as strong as his previous book. Too many poems become sentimental or seem willed rather than to come from the heart." Pat Monaghan in Booklist, however, praised Hirsch's "sure sense of the line between emotion and sentimentality." New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler felt that "when Hirsch is not being historically stagy, he is being familially prosaic, as he recalls stories told by his parents," but she also thought Hirsch "capable of quiet, believable poems." She cited the poem "Infertility" from Hirsch's The Night Parade as the most believable poem of the book, and suggested, "This poem, I suspect, will turn up in anthologies. It touches a particular connection between religious longing and secular pessimism that belongs both to the hope and desolation it commemorates and to the moment of scientific possibility and disappointment in which we live."

In his fourth collection of poems, Earthly Measures, Hirsch offers a collection focused on religious issues and imagery. Hirsch told Contemporary Authors: "If I were to describe [ Earthly Measures ], I would say that it is 'god hungry.' Earthly Measures is very much about what the soul does after hungering after God and He does not come. What does one do to fill the subsequent emptiness? The book begins in the dark wood with landscapes of ash and emptiness and hell. Throughout the book are elegies which point toward the loss of presence, power, and direction. The emptiness contains infertility but it is not defined by it. About halfway through the book it takes a turn—not toward celebration exactly, but a sort of agonized reconciliation. The tutelary figures are Simone Weil, Leopardi, and Hoffmansthal. The poems take the transformative and even redemptive powers of art seriously. Art stands against the emptiness. The book is about a soul-journey. It begins in 'Uncertainty' and concludes with an homage to the 17th century Dutch painters and their feeling for 'Earthly Light.' It is a pilgrim's progress struggling toward the light."

Reviewers had mixed opinions of Earthly Measures, with some critics praising the "god hungry" nature of the work and others terming the collection insufficiently nuanced. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Patricia Hampl remarked, "The absence of God and the abundant presence of human desire reign over his book and form a passionately important inquiry into the nature of worship." Robert B. Shaw, commenting in Poetry, likewise praised the poems in the collection for being "accessible in subject, direct in phrasing, open in their expression of emotion, graced with a finely-tuned lyricism." Yet, Shaw noted, "the neo-Romantic tone and coloration makes for a sameness . . . so that the subjects lose something of their individuality in an all-purpose luminous haze." Washington Post Book World contributor Eric Murphy Selinger also lamented the lyrical romanticism of the poems, declaring that "Hirsch is better off when his voice has a bitter or critical edge." Hampl, though, commended Hirsch for his achievement in Earthly Measures, concluding, "These are poems of immense wonder and rigor. To say they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur and generosity, and their heartbreaking longing."

In the collection On Love, Hirsch takes the voice of some two dozen poets from the past, including such diverse writers as D. H. Lawrence, Charles Baudelaire, and Jimi Hendrix. He creates an imaginary conversation between them in which they discuss the subject of love. The verses in On Love prove "without question" that Hirsch is "heir to all the great poets of the past," in the opinion of Donna Seaman of Booklist, who added that when writing about his own life, Hirsch achieves "lyric poems nearly incandescent in their sensuality." The reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that when reading Hirsch's work, "one is always aware of a formidable intelligence; wide reading, and an ambition to connect the poet's own achievement with the great poetry of the past." While acknowledging the "controlled, precise, formally ambitious" quality of Hirsch's verse, the Publishers Weekly reviewer faulted the poet's use of "a highly artificial premise, made more so by the incredibly strict forms." Yet Thomas F. Merrill in Library Journal called On Love "often stunning" for its "complex evocations of the adopted voices as well as Hirsch's own insight."

Hirsch has also written prose works that have met with critical acclaim. In How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, he collected verses from diverse times and places and then suggested ways to understand and appreciate the works. "The book is scholarly but very readable and incorporates interesting anecdotes from the lives of the poets," noted Ellen Sullivan in Library Journal. Booklist's Donna Seaman declared: "Hirsch, a truly gifted poet and scholar, brings the full heat of his literary passion to this enlightening and deeply moving journey into the heart of poetry. . . . Hirsch's magnificent text is supported by an extensive glossary and superb international reading list."

CAREER

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, assistant professor, 1979-82, associate professor of English, 1982-85; University of Houston, Houston, TX, associate professor, 1985-88, professor of English, 1988—. Member of the education advisory committee of the Guggenheim Foundation. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, president, 2002—; Member of the advisory board of the American Poetry and Literary Project.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

For the Sleepwalkers, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.
Wild Gratitude, Knopf (New York, NY), 1986.
The Night Parade, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.
Earthly Measures, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.
On Love, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.
Lay Back The Darkness, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

OTHER

(Author of introduction and selector) Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1994.
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1999.
Responsive Reading, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1999.

Contributor of articles, stories, poems, and reviews to periodicals, including New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Nation, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, and Paris Review.

MORE INFORMATION

Career
Bibliography
Further Reading

POEMS

= First appeared in Poetry magazine.

A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties

Incandescence at Dusk

Poor Angels

Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)

AUDIO

Poems of the Day
Branch Library
Late March
Self Portrait

Poetry Lectures
Edward Hirsch: American Perspectives
Edward Hirsch examines the complex relationships between American poets and painters.

Poetry Off the Shelf
A Partial History of Our Stupidity
Two poems (and some commentary) by Edward Hirsch.
Lines for Hard Times
Philip Levine reads his defiantly hopeful "They Feed They Lion" and "What Work Is" with commentary by Edward Hirsch.