If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published. Robert Hass More Quotes by Robert Hass More Quotes From Robert Hass 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 expressionpeopleideas There are either poems about sex/love or God. Robert Hass sex-lovesex Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets. Robert Hass sonnetmiltonfirsts 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 medicinewaterthinking 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 ask-measksprinciples Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists. Robert Hass philosophicalpoetthinking 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 ratiosdoubtthinking 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 mediacartoonwriting Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent. Robert Hass would-bewritingsometimes 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 grandchildrenwritingmemories 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 doewritingtrying We don't know our own story. Robert Hass storiesknows 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 kindhandspeople 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 republicanpoettwo 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 stood-upkindpounds 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 fiftybookpeople 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 scotlandcanadaengland 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 cuttinghumanityjobs [Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces. Robert Hass force The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists. Robert Hass recordspoetcentury
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