The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read… — 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
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem… — 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
Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
“But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists. — 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
