Edward Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel

The IHC Idee Levitan Endowed Lecture Series presents

5 P.M. / Thursday, May 9 / Free
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Mary Craig Auditorium
1130 State Street

Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and professor of English at the University of Houston, discusses his just-released book, The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt Brace, March, 2002). Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of The Demon and the Angel will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Book Description

A work of art, whether a painting, a dance, a poem, or a jazz composition, can be admired in its own right. But how does the artist actually create his or her work? What is the source of an artist's inspiration? What is the force that impels the artist to set down a vision that becomes art? In this groundbreaking book, poet and critic Edward Hirsch explores the concept of duende, that mysterious, highly potent power of creativity that results in a work of art. It has been said that Laurence Olivier had it, and so did Ernest Hemingway, but Maurice Evans and John O'Hara did not. Marlon Brando had it but squandered it. Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith had it, and so did Miles Davis. From Federico Garcia Lorca's wrestling with darkness as he discovered the fountain of words within himself to Martha Graham's creation of her most emotional dances, from the canvases of Robert Motherwell to William Blake's celestial visions, Hirsch taps into the artistic imagination and explains, in terms illuminating and emotional, how different artists respond to the power and demonic energy of creative impulse. A masterful tour of the minds and thoughts of writers, poets, painters, and musicians, including Paul Klee, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Baudelaire, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Anthony Hecht, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, William Meredith, Sylvia Plath, and Jackson Pollock.

About the Author

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania. His five books of poetry include: On Love (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Earthly Measures (1994); The Night Parade (1989); Wild Gratitude (1986), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and For the Sleepwalkers (1981), which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. He writes frequently about poetry for leading magazines and periodicals, among them American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, where he is editorial advisor in poetry, The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the National Book Critics Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. In 1998 he was granted a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Houston.

Photo Credit: Evan Thayer

This event is sponsored by the IHC Idee Levitan Endowed Lecture Series, UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.