The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs,… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write. — 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
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
“When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because… — 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
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
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long… — 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
I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very… — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day. — Robert Hass Copy Share Image
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. — 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
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
As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which… — 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 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
