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

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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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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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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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[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
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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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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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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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
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Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
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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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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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Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
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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As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
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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If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
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