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Quote by 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.”

Quote by Robert Hass

Author

Robert Hass is an American poet known for his concise and profound poetry style. His works explore themes of nature, history, and the human condition, and have won numerous literary awards. more

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“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.”

People Happens Values Imagination Land Century Relation Instance Artistic Parks Legislation Teddy National Parks Wild Things Wordsworth David Thoreau

Author:Robert Hass

“I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.”

Thinking Said Belief Poetry Is Sheer Enchantment Reinforcement Disenchantment

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“The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.”

Records Century Poet 20th Century Fascists

Author:Robert Hass

“The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.”

Thinking Humans Wish Poet Closest Great Poet

Author:Robert Hass

“[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.”

Author:Robert Hass

“[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.”

War Force Republican Sick Died Civil War Fund Fascists Spanish Civil War

Author:Robert Hass

“Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.”

Sides Solutions Smarter Propose

Author:Robert Hass

“[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.”

Wells Ideas States Political Water Justice Cities Figures Thinker Medieval Emblems

Author:Robert Hass

“As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.”

Jobs Artist Given Work Out

Author:Robert Hass

“At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.”

Way Ideas Able Levels Alive Tasks Locals Abstraction

Author:Robert Hass