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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
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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
Experience
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Officials
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Poetry
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More quotes by 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
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Robert Hass
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
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
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
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
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
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Robert Hass
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
Robert Hass
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
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
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass
