“Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.” PeopleMindReadingImaginationExistenceQualityTeacherTaughtReadyMindfulnessWork OutIntimateShockGymnasiums Author:Robert Hass
“Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.” WantImaginationTakenEconomicMilitaryTasksRevengeProfessionScalesAppealsMassiveEngineeringDomination Book:Time and materials: poems, 1997-2005 Source: Time and materials: poems, 1997-2005
“As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.” WayLiteratureCommunityImaginationPoetDecidedConnectedShowing Up Author:Robert Hass
“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.” PeopleIfsGovernmentRunningCommunityImaginationFiguresTaughtPossessionGet UpHeritageFrostWaltPlath Author: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.” PeopleHappensValuesImaginationLandCenturyRelationInstanceArtisticParksLegislationTeddyNational ParksWild ThingsWordsworthDavid Thoreau 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
“Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.” IfsNeedsRunningWaterImaginationLandPreserves Author:Robert Hass
