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…

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

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

— Robert Hass

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

— Robert Hass

Justice is the well water of the city of/ Novgorod, black and sweet

— Robert Hass

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures -…

— Robert Hass

“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

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge…

— Robert Hass

If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational…

— Robert Hass

[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the…

— Robert Hass

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

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when…

— Robert Hass

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public…

— Robert Hass