“What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.” PeopleThinkingFirstsIdeasPastLinesApproachFirst TimeNew IdeasRecurrence Author:Robert Hass
“Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.” FirstsCenturyPoetTwentiesCrucialVividTranslations Author:Robert Hass
“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.” FirstsIdeasSoulAbleIdealsUniversalImportanceDemocraticWestCitizenshipLiteracyProtestants Author:Robert Hass
“The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.” PeopleYearsFirstsDoneShowsWaitingBlackParticularProjectsTheaterTeenagerChicagoSustainingStrawberriesCreeksBerkeley Author:Robert Hass
“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.” WorldWritingFirstsSeemsFictionStudyPoetCriticismUniversityFiction WritersDisconnectedLiterary Criticism Author:Robert Hass
“When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.” PeopleIfsFirstsBookCountryRunningMillionsAudienceFiveExampleExpectationsIncreaseSizeFiftyPrintBostonElevenEmilySellersReadershipBest Sellers Author:Robert Hass
“My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.” ThinkingFirstsWellsTwoBookAnswersFinishedThirty Author:Robert Hass
“Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.” FirstsPersonsSonnetFirst PersonMilton Author: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.” FirstsBookSchoolBrotherHigh SchoolSeniorBrothers KaramazovHigh School Senior Author:Robert Hass
