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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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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Couldn
Poetry
Books
Read
Three
Book
Published

More quotes by 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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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 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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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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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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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
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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
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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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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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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
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I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
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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My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
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There are either poems about sex/love or God.
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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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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As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
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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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