Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one.… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project:… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature,… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image