American - Poet | March 1, 1941 -
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
Robert Hass
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I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?'
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