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Quote by Robert Hass

“I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.”

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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“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.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.”

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“If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.”

Author:Robert Hass

“When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.”

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Author:Robert Hass

“One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.”

Knows Culture One Thing Century Products Mass England Canada Ireland Scotland Literacy 19th Century English Speaking

Author:Robert Hass

“You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?”

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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.”

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Author:Robert Hass