“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.” FormPoetryWriters On Writing Author:Robert Hass
“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.” PeopleIfsIdeasGovernmentAbleFormCivilizationAchievementMassDemocraticComplicatedForms Of Government Author:Robert Hass
“One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.” PeopleThinkingWayFormInterestingWrittenCenturyInformationArgumentTasksGenrePleasantProseNonfictionVersesRhymeInteresting Things18th CenturyConveying Author: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.” PeopleShouldTryingDoeIdeasReasonFormStuffImaginationSpecialInformationExpressionArgumentMereProsePopeRomanticism Author:Robert Hass
“Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.” PeopleThinkingKnowsWayNeedsWritingTryingKindChildrenWarProblemHappensAgeFormStuffViolenceLaborSightStuckWitnessBe YouElsewhereLive Your LifeGlobalizationVictimizationChild LaborSweatshops Author:Robert Hass
