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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Fireplace
Fireplaces
Winter
Summer
Poetry
Fans
More quotes by Robert Hass
Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.
Robert Hass
Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.
Robert Hass
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Robert Hass
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
Robert Hass
There are either poems about sex/love or God.
Robert Hass
Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
Robert Hass
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
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 the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.
Robert Hass
I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.
Robert Hass
In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.
Robert Hass
Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.
Robert Hass
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Robert Hass
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.
Robert Hass
Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.
Robert Hass
My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.
Robert Hass
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
Robert Hass
As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
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. And so then you think, Well, what have you failed to do? And my answer to myself was almost everything.
Robert Hass
I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.
Robert Hass