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I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.
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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Harvard
Stevens
Thinking
Forty
Stein
Population
Astronomical
Americans
Gertrude
Percent
Wallace
College
Attended
Education
Frost
More quotes by Robert Hass
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
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
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
If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.
Robert Hass
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
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
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
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
As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
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
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
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
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
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
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
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
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.
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
