Robert Hass Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• There are either poems about sex/love or God.

  Robert Hass

  Sex, Sex Love

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Trying, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

  Robert Hass

  Sides, Propose, Smarter

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Land, Imagination, People

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

  5 Copy quote

• I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

  Robert Hass

  Heart, Talking, Ladders

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Children, School

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Government, People, Giving

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

  Robert Hass

  Jobs, Cutting, Humanity

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

  Robert Hass

  Self, Long, Community

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

  Robert Hass

  Art, Attachment, Land

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

  Robert Hass

  Ideas, Soul, Able

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Imagination, Community, Way

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Mean, Writing

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Ideas, Russia

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

  Robert Hass

  School, Kids, Class

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  9 Copy quote

• If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

  Robert Hass

  Responsible, Places You Live, Watersheds

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  15 Copy quote

• It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

  Robert Hass

  Rivers, Black, Maps

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

  Robert Hass

  Country, Two, Rivers

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

  Robert Hass

  Jobs, Educational, Opportunity

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

  Robert Hass

  School, Class, California

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Long, People

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.

  Robert Hass

  Civilization, Ideas, Government

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

  4 Copy quote

• One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

  Robert Hass

  Book, People, Fifty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

  Robert Hass

  Pounds, Kind, Stood Up

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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