After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of… — 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
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
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
Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it,… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep… — 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
