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There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

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
Happen
Wild
Instances
Beauty
John
Roosevelt
Percolate
Values
Relation
Henry
Muir
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National
David
Thoreau
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Took
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Parks
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Land
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Teddy

More quotes by Robert Hass

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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.
Robert Hass
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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.
Robert Hass
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[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
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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
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As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.
Robert Hass
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Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Robert Hass
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What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.
Robert Hass
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Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass
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Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Robert Hass
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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.
Robert Hass
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Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.
Robert Hass
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My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
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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.
Robert Hass
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If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
Robert Hass
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You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.
Robert Hass
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Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
Robert Hass
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Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.
Robert Hass
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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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Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
Robert Hass
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Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass