Robert Hass Quotes - Page 4

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• After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its best expression is through poetry. Therefore, poetry should not try to do the stuff that mere prose does: convey information or make arguments about ideas.

  Robert Hass

  Expression, Ideas, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Medicine, Water

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Government, People, Giving

  Interview with 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Three, Ifs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Creative, Facts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Knowing, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

  Robert Hass

  Scotland, Canada, England

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

  Robert Hass

  War, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

  Robert Hass

  Morning, War, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

  Robert Hass

  Firsts, Milton, Sonnet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Two, Republican, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Past, Looks, Violence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

  Robert Hass

  Art, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

  Robert Hass

  Memories, Writing, Grandchildren

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Would Be, Sometimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Skills, Political, Special

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Doubt, Ratios

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

  Robert Hass

  Philosophical, Thinking, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

  Principles, Ask Me, Asks

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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