Quote

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

Robert Hass

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Poetry
Takes
Sides
Else
Proposes
Propose
Smarter
Solutions
Anybody

More quotes by Robert Hass

Image
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
Image
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
Image
The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.
Robert Hass
Image
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
Image
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.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
Image
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
Image
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
Robert Hass
Image
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.
Robert Hass