There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. – Robert Hass
The first book that really knocked me out was the ‘Brothers Karamazov.’ I read it when I was a senior in high school. – Robert Hass
I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read. – Robert Hass
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it’s their only elective, so this is their one shot. They’ll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets. – Robert Hass
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
When I was in high school in the ’50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal. – Robert Hass
You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools. – Robert Hass
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. – Robert Hass
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
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that. – Robert Hass
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn’t notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large. – Robert Hass
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills. – Robert Hass
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don’t read books. – Robert Hass
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: ‘How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?’ – Robert Hass