“If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.” PeopleIfsThinkingNeedsTryingSmartStartingConvictionConvinceTerritoryRhetoric 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
“Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.” FirstsPersonsSonnetFirst PersonMilton Author:Robert Hass
“Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.” TwoPoetRepublicanIreland Author:Robert Hass
“Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.” PeopleKindHandsVariousVersionsOfficialsInconvenient Author:Robert Hass
“Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.” LooksPastViolenceRepeats Author:Robert Hass
“Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.” WritingTryingDoeLanguageResearchOriginalsExperimentsPoundsPoetry IsFormal Author:Robert Hass