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Poetry Quotes by Robert Hass

50 Poetry quotes by Robert Hass

All Poetry quotes Robert Hass’s page

Hass points out that poetry isn’t a secret weapon; it’s no smarter than anyone else. He warns that when a poem tries to convince people, it becomes rhetoric, not poetry. He also suggests that good verses should flow straight from the mind, without hesitation.

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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

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Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

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There are either poems about sex/love or God.

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“August is dust here. Drought stuns the road, but juice gathers in the berries.”

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It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

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If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

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As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

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I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in…

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The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm…

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I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

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Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to…

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Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence.…

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I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In…

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Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

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The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs,…

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When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because…

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As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for…

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I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only…

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You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read…

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I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only…

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Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are…

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Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural…

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Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of…

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I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and…

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One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read…

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When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven…

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I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with…

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When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very…

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“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children…

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“ A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and…

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“But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why…

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Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

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I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful…

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The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have…

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When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so…

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I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read…

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Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

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“When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say…

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The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

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There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable,…

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More by Robert Hass

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…

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I…

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its…

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature,…

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or…

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…

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that…

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of…

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in…

“ A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead…

“When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine…