Edward Hirsch Taught the World to Appreciate Poetry

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Recommended: American poetry history

Edward Hirsch taught everyone to love and appreciate poetry to its greatest potential. Born in Chicago on January 20, 1950, he began writing at a young age and his traditional writing style of formal with a small creative twist. He strengthened America Poetry and gave a different view of literary criticism.
Like any other eight year old boy, Hirsch loved sports, but he also fell in love with poetry. He found and read a copy of Emily Brontë’s “Spellbound” and loved it. As a child, he did not read a lot or really enjoy it, but through his mother’s coaxing with books about sports, he read. Hirsch’s grandfather helped develop his poetic skills. His grandfather wrote poetry but his was very unconventional because he wrote in Hebrew from right to left making it impossible for Hirsch to read it. His grandfather quoted Shakespeare and Keats to him as a child without ever identifying it (Barker 213-214).
“’The trademarks of his poems are things I strive to bring to my own writing: to be intimate but restrained, to be tender without being sentimental to witness life without flinching, and above all, to isolate and preserve those details of our existence so often overlooked, so easily forgotten, so essential to our souls’” (Edward Hirsch Poetry Foundation 1). Hirsch’s poetry was praised from the beginning. His first book of poetry was For the Sleepwalkers, written in 1981, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. This was a great inaugural book that catapulted Hirsch’s writings. Just five years later, his second book of poetry is published, Wild Gratitude which won ...

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...w York City. He is not teaching in a formal setting as a classroom but his books and poetry continue to teach about poetry. He is a member of the education advisory committee of the Guggenheim Foundation, John Simon Gugenheim Memorial Foundation where he is president, and a Member of the advisory board of the American Poetry and Literary Project. He continues to write poetry with his latest volume of poetry published in 2010, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems 1972-2010.

Works Cited

Barker, Brian. “About Edward Hirsch.” Ploughshares 33.1 (2007): 213. MasterFILE Premier. Web.12 Feb. 2014.
"Edward Hirsch."Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
"Edward Hirsch." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Hirsch, The Biography of Edward. "The Biography of Edward Hirsch." Poemhunter.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.

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