Poet's Choice

by Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch began writing a column called "Poet’s Choice" in the Washington Post Book World in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry. Poet’s Choice includes the work of more than one hundred poets from ancient times to the present—among them Sappho, W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Amy Lowell, Mark Strand, and many more—and shares them with all of Hirsch’s inimitable enthusiasm and joy. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book offers us the fruits of a life lived in poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Writing, Literary Criticism, Language

450 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
bio-img
Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award.
Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994),On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems.Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘I give my life to you.
To you I write my poems.’
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Back in college I chanced upon a much used copy of Edward Hirsch’s Poet’s Choice and quickly snatched it up. While I had already been a fan of the art form and was eagerly seeking out new poets, Hirsch’s selections and mini essays on these 130 poets and various topics became quite an exceptional doorway into a wider world of poetry. It opened my eyes to new poets, it taught me new ways of understanding the verses of some I knew, it pointed towards better skills for comprehending or thinking about poems, and best of all, Hirsch’s enthusiasm and love for poetry radiated from the page right into my heart and helped solidify a deep love and respect for the art. Poetry has been an important part of my life, a companion on hard days, a hobby I practiced my hand at, even publishing a few of my own and I was once invited to do a reading at Michigan State University. I spent years making small paintings, writing favorite passages of poems on them and leaving them on trees, cataloguing them on an instagram account @poe_a_tree (I got featured in our local newspaper and others on multiple occasions, I was eventually told I legally could not do it around town anymore as a “graffiti violation”), and just last week hosted a rather successful Poetry Open Mic through the library at a local coffee shop.

Shoutout to Lemonjellos coffee shop in Holland, MI for hosting us!

But enough about me because we are here to celebrate Edward Hirsch and his book. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead,’ wrote John Keats and Hirsch is one of the poets making sure it is alive and well through his many books on the art. Poet’s Choice is fantastic, yet his others such as How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, The Heart of American Poetry, or A Poet's Glossary are all indispensable reads as well. And, of course, there is his wonderful poetry, such as the selected poems in The Living Fire . This is a great anthology that allows Hirsch to show off some favorite poems while also speak at length about the poets with biographical details and poetic insights as well as dip into a whole slew of other topics in chapters on subjects like Olympian odes, American prose poem, poems on birth, riddles, Scottish ballads, even poems about Baseball or Basketball. And the poem selection is wonderful.

Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
      before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
        I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
    we must live as if we will never die.

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
    and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
    I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
    in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
         if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .
—Nâzım Hikmet from On Living

‘Poetry is a means of exchange,’ Hirsch tells us, ‘a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift,’ and this becomes a great gift of communication between poet, text, and reader, as well as a wonderful conversation between Hirsch and us to educate and inspire. And Hirsch is a wealth of knowledge. I enjoy how he examines poets s as a ‘maker’ of sorts where, as Frank Bidart wrote ‘making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.,’ pushing the idea of self-reflection as a maker to the heights of the Ars Poetica where ‘poetry is the subject of the poem’. While Hirsch presents us with a rather lovely poem Ars Poetica by Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova where she says ‘write each of your poems / as if it were your last,’ I’d like to add my own favorite poem of the genre, Ars Poetica by Aracelis Girmay:

May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.
Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record
of the foot’s silver prayer.
          I lived once.
          Thank you.
          It was here.

I love the notion of poetry being a way of saying “I was here” and there is so much to be thankful about poetry for. ‘I want to give thanks,’ Jorge Luis Borges writes in Another Poem of Gifts , ‘for the fact that the poem is inexhaustible / and becomes one with the sum of all created things / and will never reach its last verse / and varies according to its writers…’ Hirsch celebrates this with a really great variety of poets and poems and it was through this book that I actually learned of a lot of poets who I would go on to really love. Poets like Eavan Boland, Marina Tsvetaeva, Russell Edson, Yehuda Amichai, César Vallejo, Naomi Shihab Nye and others were all poets I sought out after reading about them here. Hirsch does go through over 130 poets and touches on some very universally known names like Pablo Neruda, Sappho, W.B. Yeats, and Rainer Maria Rilke among others as well making this a great book for those with any level of poetry knowledge.

Lullaby
Reetika Vazirani

I would not sing you to sleep.
I would press my lips to your ear
And hope the terror in my heart stirs you.

One aspect I really appreciate about Poet’s Choice is the rather interesting variety of poets from around the world. ‘It seems natural to me to converse with writers from other countries,’ Hirsch tells us, citing his Eastern European heritage. Part of why I ever picked this up in the first place was that I had been very interested in Polish poetry at the time, my family being from Poland, and was geeked to find Hirsch had chapters on several poets I was reading at the time, namely Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski. Though while there is a great variety there is a rather notable lack of Asian poets aside from the chapter Young Asian American Women Poets featuring writers like Quan Barry and a few nods to Matsuo Bashō and while the list of poets does skew towards men, Hirsch does a good job of including plenty of great women poets (shoutout to his chapter on Louise Glück in particular, who would later win the Nobel Prize in 2020).

‘It is difficult
To get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably every day
For lack
Of what is found there’
—William Carlos Williams

In his memoirs, Neruda writes ‘poetry is a deep inner calling,’ and ‘today’s social poet is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and now he must interpret the light.’ Hirsch excels at balancing darkness and light in this collection, with poems that we can grieve along with and poems that will bring joy into our hearts. Its hard to read this and NOT fall in love with poetry.

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley from To a Skylark

Basically all I needed to say was that Poet’s Choice was an essential book to my falling in love with poetry and making it an essential part of my life. ‘I have lived with these poems until they have become part of the air that I breathe,’ Hirsch writes, ‘I hope they will become part of the reader’s world too.’ They certainly did for me and I hope they will for you too.

4.5/5

Seawall
Julia de Burgos

I'm going to make a seawall
with my small happiness...
I don't want the sea to know
that pains go through my breast.

I don't want the sea to touch
the shore of my earth...
I have run out of dreams,
crazy from shadows in the sand.

I don't want the sea to look
at blue mourning in my path...
(My eyelids were auroras
when the storm crossed!)

I don't want the sea to cry
a new rainstorm at my door...
All the eyes of the wind
already cry me as dead.

I'm going to make a seawall
with my small happiness,
light happiness of knowing myself,
mind the hand that closes.

I don't want the sea to arrive
at the thirst of my poem,
blind in the middle of light,
broken in the middle of an absence.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. There has never been a civilization without it. That's why I consider poetry — which is, after all, created out of a mouthful of air — a human fundamental, like music. It saves something precious in the world from vanishing. It sacramentalizes experience. It is an imaginative act that starts with the breath itself. It arises from breathing. It is a living thing that comes from the body, from the heart, from the heart and lungs, and this seems hardwired into us. It enters our bodies through the material stream of language. It moves and dances between speech and song. These words rhythmically strung together, these electrically charged sounds, are one of the ways we come to know ourselves. A poem beats out time.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A treasure for anyone who wants to read more modern poetry but doesn't know where to begin or what to think of what's out there. Hirsch gives us a large and eclectic sampling, and writes with such knowledge so as to make accessible what can sometimes seem more like a brick wall. His enthusiasm and appreciation are an education. And I kept thinking as I read - no one could say after hearing all these voices, that people are the same - I mean, the plenitude of sameness had me wonderstruck. We all love and cry and hate and heal - but with such variety of colour and shades and levels and angles and depths and tilts as to astound. Which probably doesn't make any sense the way I've written it. Anyway, I highly recommend this book to poetry lovers.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much confessional and quasi-confessional poetry here for my tastes. I know some people love it, but for me personally, listening to poets talk about themselves for hours on end is like a cross between being on a really bad blind date and being cornered by a stranger with TMI disease. They’re like people who never grew out of that childhood stage when we think we are actually the center of the universe. This is why I would much rather read Emily Dickinson’s stunning observations of the natural world than Walt Whitman’s ejaculatory celebrations of the self. But to each his own.

[Texx Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, of course, a great way to take articles and create a book, without actually having to write a book from scratch. However, this is an important book and a great concept that al poets and writes should consider following.

Most of us underestimate, and undervalue poetry. In this book, Mr. Hirsch selects poems, quotes the poems [making this a sort of collection of his favorite poems] and commentary on why the poems are good, or important.

I am doing the same thing in my private writings, but I wish more people were doing something like this.

Have you ever read a poem and gone, "I wonder why that got published? What was good about that poem?" Sometimes, an explanation from a fan as to why this poem is good, or important, or so satisfying can give a non-poetry reader an "Ah-Ha" moment. Books like Poet’s Choice can become the door ding that causes you to notice poetry. Books like this book can cause you to read, enjoy, and care more for poetry. If you become a lover of poetry, if you start to care more for poetry, you get a gift: an enhanced existence. You will learn to love what dense language can do. Read this book if you don’t love poetry, or........if you do love poetry.
:^D

[Jimmy Ding · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poet's Choice is a curated and heavily annotated anthology of poems from many places around the world and from many eras of history. Reading it was a bit like walking through an art museum with someone who studies art history. In this analogy I am colorblind, and despite my guide's best efforts and despite finding some lovely pieces, my legs began to grow tired and I increasingly wanted to go home.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hirsch is honest about the choices he makes for why he included particular poets and poems in this book. He freely admits that his decisions were based on his own subjective preferences, and that doesn't bother me because I've never heard of the vast majority of the ones I read about--so I have plenty of reading material for the future.

Hirsch splits this book into two sections, one for non-American writers and the other for American writers. He clearly loves Pablo Neruda, who by far has the most pages dedicated to a single poet in the entire book, and he also loves to compare poets to Whitman. The majority of his choices are based on poets whose work is concerned with issues relating to being an outsider or issues related to life and death. He also chose poets who are now dead along with poets he's known for a substatial amount of time. Still, Hirsch's choices are relevant and appropriate. (Although if Luise Gluck hadn't been included, I'd be writing him a letter.)

Overall, this book is a good place to find poets and poetry from those whose work often is overlooked or has been forgotten. The biographies and sample poems also are useful for those who want to pin down a particular poet or genre quickly and easily.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Edward Hirsch is too in love with poetry. His rapturous affection is evidenced by his overflowing, rather gushing praise of almost every single poet he showcases in his Choice.

The book runs overly long, and before the reader is over a quarter finished, the reader is lost in a plethora of names and titles and collections. It would have been better to pick a few poets and spend longer with them than to present a collection of extremely short introductions to a hundred or more poets.

I also found Hirsch's habit of quoting poems in line with the prose to be very annoying as poetry is meant to be read formatted correctly, and he seems to quote some poems in line and some poems as formatted without rhyme or reason. Also, he alludes or references too many poems and then discusses them without ever actually quoting the poem or giving a hint as to what it actually says, as if Hirsch assumes that his reader has read the poems he talks about. Finally, he often spends many paragraphs talking about a poem that he never quotes and finishes by including the full text of an entirely different poem.

Overall the collection was confusing, long, badly formatted, and lacking in depth and context.

[Debnance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once, poetry was a common part of everyday life. Robert Hass wants to bring poetry back into the lives of workaday men and women. During the time he spent as Poet Laureate of the US, Hass decided to read widely and write a weekly newspaper column about poetry. This book is a compilation of the columns Hass write during the two year term.

Hass focuses on new poetry, but now and then he tosses in an old favorite or two. New or old, the poems he shares with us, his readers, his everyday readers, are intriguing, thoughtful, worthy.

I thank Hass for the work he did in. I wish my small town newspaper had a weekly poetry column. After all, as we poetry lovers know:

“It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there—”

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book of essays on poetry so much that I reread several of the essays. I'm not sure I'm ready to pass this one on yet.

Yes, this is a book of essays on poetry and, yes, I loved it so much more than the two horrible novels I attempted this week and, no, I don't care that probably no one else in the entire world or even in the entire book-loving world would read this book. I loved it.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of 130 newspaper columns that Hirsch wrote for the Washington Post, each briefly discussing the work of a poet or poets he admires, is like a treasure trove of bread crumbs which can lead the reader onto paths of interest throughout the poetic corpus. Hirsch's love of poetry is wide ranging and enthusiastic and it's hard to imagine anyone but the expert not finding introductions here to new and interesting poets, and more avenues down which to go exploring.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the poetic prose in defense of poetry. Striking selections that I was not familiar with made it an interesting exploration of poetry.

[max · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hirsch’s collection of short essays on poetry and poets, most originally published in the Washington Post, is at times brilliant--packed with accumulated centuries of lore and chosen from by one of the most sensitive poetic minds entering the 21st century--but also is at at times preachy and vacuous, falling victim to Hirsch’s deep reluctance to criticize or find fault.

The first score or so of entries are Hirsch’s best, where he locates the founding myths of the tradition of poetry in English, while quickly staking out ways to expand it: Caedmon, Pindar, Sappho, the Makers, the Irish Bardic tradition, riddles and charms, and the idea of praise. He expands out from here in fascinating directions, to Aztecs, Christmas, Yeats, Italian poetry, ars poetica, insomnia, and many other topics that he seemingly can conjure out of air and fill with poetry.

The problem with Hirsch’s book is one of authority. A good critic will show the reader the sharpness of his knife by making the occasional incision. But Hirsch keeps this aspect of his faculty sheathed. Everyone and everything this books encounters is magical, profound, transformative, and amazing. Either Edward Hirsch has never read a bad poem by a good poet, or fears that admitting the fallibility of poets would somehow discredit the entire art form. As a result, his book seems to suggest its canon is a sacred cow. This is a serious problem.

Thus the reader slowly become inured to his praise of great men and women, especially with respect to poetry in translation. Let’s look at his examination of a two Polish poets, who I had the good fortune of being introduced to in graduate school by poet and scholar Jonathan Aaron: Milosz and Zagajewski. Aaron introduced these poets slowly, in context, with heaps of supporting prose, both critical and historical. I was warned of the special problem of poetry in translation, and we approached their poems with caution. But the reader coming to Hirsch’s book likely has no such forewarning. Instead, on the Czeslaw Milosz chapter, Hirsch opens cryptically with the following:

“Sometimes at night or in the early morning, the phrases--the lines--come back to me like talismans, like hard-won messages, metaphysical truths, prayers, offerings from the deep.”

On Zagajewski, he begins with this priestly pronouncement:

“Adam Zagajewski’s poems put us in the presence of great mysteries.”

If Hirsch had elected not to focus so much on poetry in translation, perhaps the audacity--and ultimately the preposterousness--of his preachifying would be mitigated. But similar problems plague his treatment of English-language greats.

And it’s not that I disagree with him. Milosz and Zagajewski really are wonderful reads. But he’s speaking to the converted. Hirsch needs explain why some poems are great and some are not. And in order to do so, he needs contrast stronger writing against weaker writing and introduce readers to specific elements of their craft so next time around, they can do this work for themselves (teach a man to fish and all that). But by not doing so, the reader will likely walk away from this book convinced that poetry is an art where skill is not nearly as important as sentiment, and as long as the sentiment is extraordinarily lofty and philosophic, the job is pretty much done. Or worse, that poets are hucksters, selling wishy-washy nonsense to a bunch of cretins, led by pied pipers the likes of Edward HIrsch.

This very much isn’t true. Hirsch himself is a poet I greatly admire, a poet when at his best, offers one of the best living American models available for how free verse ought to function. (At his worst, his free verse blends a little too readily into the crowd of replacement-level filler found in an hundred different American poetry journals). I want to learn from him, and I want him to share himself more fully with his readers. But as it is, readers are better off reading his poetry. This book is dangerously light on substance.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection has introduced some new poets for me to check out.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

An award-winning poet himself, Edward Hirsch expresses his deeply-honored love and respect for poetry in this book. In fact, it serves as an homage to the craft and language of poetry that produces great emotive responses in people. With his short, essay-like chapters, Hirsch provides acute commentary on hundreds of poets and poems featured throughout the book. He shows how they have impacted and guided the quest of his own poetic vision and verse, and how they have helped him work to discover the world in all its pain, joy, horror, and beauty. The introduction in the book sets out what amounts to Hirsch’s manifesto of the “talismanic power” poetry has had over him. He says poetry is more than an art that we may appreciate; it is vital and essential for living. It helps us heal, it preserves our memories, it transforms our fears, and it exalts our hopes. Hirsch’s book will be admired and enjoyed by anyone interested in poetry. For beginners or serious devotees of poetry alike, the book can certainly inspire.

[Sherry Elmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Ed Hirsch says in his anthology, "the original meaning of the word anthology, which derives from the Greek, is 'flower gathering,' and these books compose a surprisingly diverse and colorful garden." Hirsch was speaking of Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem anthologies, but his statement applies to his own anthology, as well. Poet's Choice is a well-chosen and enthusiastically-tended garden of poets and poetry, both American and international. Reading Poet's Choice, I was introduced to many poets and poems I'd never before met, and enjoyed spending time with some of my favorites. Hirsch's enthusiasm for poetry is contagious, making this a great anthology for the beginning poetry reader, but his selection is wide and generous, making it equally valuable for long-time poetry lovers.

[Christine Potter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really terrific spin on the anthology idea--a group of articles about poets and poems as well as the poems themselves. The reader gets Hirsch's amazing depth of knowledge on poetry as well as his excellent taste in choosing it. His prose is very readable, by the way--perhaps not as lively as his readings, but smart and engaging.

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

i took a year to read this book. It sat beside my bed and gave me a few pages a night to ponder. It is a way to "read a poem a day" which is an excellent idea and to have a wonderful writer tell you something about each poet or each theme. It includes a section on international poets and a section on American ones. I got to reading one of each on some nights. I will miss this nightly friend!

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this chapter by chapter since 2007, and just finished. I'll let it sit, and then start again. It's a crash course in poetry, written by a poet/journalist/teacher. It reacquaints you with old friends, and introduces the new. It's a boon to poets' royalties in that it had me buying books every other chapter.

[Sacha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was expecting an anthology, but this is more a collection of (short) conversations about poetry. Edward Hirsch's thoughts never failed to enhance the poems he presented. His descriptions of poets were truly beautiful and specific. Thanks to this one, I've bought 3 other books... so far.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of Poetry, with interesting information on all the poets. It contains a lot of my favorite poets, all the most successful poets and some that are not well-known but amazing in their own rite. If you like a compact collection of great poems, this book is for you. Lovely!

[Riegs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically, it's a guy picking his favorite contemporary poems and then explaining why they're good. A little self-indulgent, but it's to be expected. They're like super-mini hybrids. The nice thing was that he included over 130 poets, and it was split between American and world poets.

[Niño Manaog Saavedra · Rating 5 out of 5]

In each poet he features, he unveils mysteries of the poets' worlds to me. He makes clear the motives and tendencies of otherwise unknown or unsung chroniclers of pain and suffering. Each piece allows me to unveil myself the metaphors and unlock the mysteries in each sensibility.

[Scott Ansley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read. Hirsch writes beautifully while writing about beautiful writing. His incites into the history of the each of the poets and where they were writing during their masterpieces are extremely pleasurable to read. His ability to show the humanity in the heroes we read is lovely.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Hirsch has compiled brief (2-3 pages) details of some poets along with short parts of their work. He clearly loves poetry (to an extreme). I had hoped to read through this book and find some poets that I might be interested in reading more of the work. I'm not sure that I did.

[De'Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a change to write poetry and I'm happy for the change. I'm more confident about myself afterword

[Thorin McGee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some amazing poems I don't think I would have found otherwise. One of the most rewarding books I ever bought.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've found so many great & and unfamiliar poets in here that I stopped counting. The essays connect, coming as they do from Ed Hirsch, poetry lover, as opposed to Ed Hirsch, poetry expert.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. love. Ed. Hirsch. This is the book I could give to my aunt who can't stand poetry to explain to her why I love you.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Analyze and annotate and anthologize your favorite poems as a project. Choose carefully, wisely. Make top ten lists. Name-drop, occasionally. Quote away, evermore.