I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.
Edward HirschAs a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.
Edward HirschThere's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
Edward Hirsch