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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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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Political
Poets
Problem
Invention
Skills
Poet
Level
Levels
Special
Legislators
Politics
Describing

More quotes by Robert Hass

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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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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
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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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Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
Robert Hass
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Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Robert Hass
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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
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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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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
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Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
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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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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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Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Robert Hass
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Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.
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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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
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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
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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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Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
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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
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Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
Robert Hass