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The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called Rusia en 1931. This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

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
Thinking
Saying
Cesar
Called
Mandelstam
Wish
Stalinist
Comes
Closest
Human
Wishes
Humans
Poem
Great
Anti
Think
Poet

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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One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.
Robert Hass
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Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
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I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
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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It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
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
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I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
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In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
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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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.
Robert Hass
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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
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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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[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
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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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
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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
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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
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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.
Robert Hass