Quote

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

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
Tasks
Engineering
Military
Scale
Imagination
Appeals
Economic
Scales
Taken
Massive
Death
Revenge
Someone
Task
Mobilize
Always
Profession
Domination

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If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
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When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
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As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
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If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
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Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
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Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
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The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
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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.
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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.
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My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
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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.
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The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
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Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
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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.
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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.
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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 studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.
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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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What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
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I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.
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