the burden and the splendor

Pearl London: We live in a society that is deeply aware of its uprootedness, of loss, of alienation in all forms and shapes. You often use the word "praise: in your poetry, and you quote Auden's "affirming flame." The feeling we can we can find in your three books is of something deep-seated, something very shared and rare in this society. But I ask myself, What is there to praise that is so powerful? With all of the ineptness and all the wounding in society, does this praise come from your sense, as you put it, of “surviving the nightfall”?

Edward Hirsch: Well, you’ve raised the idea of alienation. And loss. I believe that that’s the beginning of poetry. Poetry begins with alienation, and poetry speaks against our vanishing. The lyric poem in particular seems to me to have the burden and the splendor of preserving the human image in words, as the most intense form of discourse. Poetry speaks about and against loss in its root function. I see the writing of a poem as a descent. The descent is psychological. That which is darkest in human experience. It can be in yourself, it can be in others, it can be in the death of someone you love. It’s a descent into the unconscious. You try to unearth something. You try to bring something to the light.

 

- Edward Hirsch, in conversation with Pearl London in 1993, from Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets (ed. Alexander Neubauer, Knopf, 2011).