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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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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
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More quotes by Robert Hass
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
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
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
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
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
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
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
I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
Robert Hass
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass
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
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
Robert Hass
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
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
Robert Hass
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
My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
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
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
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.
Robert Hass
