My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much. Robert Hass More Quotes by Robert Hass More Quotes From Robert Hass 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 If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have. Robert Hass government imagination running 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 ladders heart talking 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 maps black rivers 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 rivers two country 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 educational opportunity jobs 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 california class school 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 government civilization ideas 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 able soul ideas [Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died. Robert Hass republican sick war Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else. Robert Hass smarter propose sides [Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice. Robert Hass cities justice ideas If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published. Robert Hass three ifs book 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 creative writing facts 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 years thinking There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time. Robert Hass research littles people 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 knowing book years 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 criticism writing fiction I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then. Robert Hass artistic-life mean world 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 fighting mean thinking
