About Robert Hass
Robert Hass is an American poet and writer who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. His poems tend to vary in structure as he alternates between prose-like blocks and free verse and have been said to have a stylistic clarity, seen in his simple, clear language and precise imagery. Robert Hass's works are well known for their West Coast subjects and attitudes, and he can be seen reading his poems in this video. Hass was the first poet laureate from the West Coast. Born in San Francisco, he began writing at the height of the Beat movement, and poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were his early models. Hass has an abiding interest in world literature and has translated Chinese and Japanese poetry, and was a close friend and translator of Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. One of his most popular books is a translation of haiku by Basho, Buson, and Issan, which made haiku into one of the best-known poetic forms. Hass’s engaging critical voice has introduced many new readers to the emotional and intellectual pleasures of reading poetry. His first book of poetry was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973. His second. Praise, won the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979 and is widely regarded as one of the most influential poetry volume of the seventies. He also won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. In 2014, he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.As poet laureate, Hass continued the work of his predecessor, Rita Dove, in making the post a very public position, one primarily focused on programs that increased literacy. He read throughout the country, wrote a syndicated newspaper column for the Washington Post introducing general readers to short lyric poems, and continued his full-time teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Hass ardently believes that “values come from the imagination,” that “poets have a moral responsibility to make and refresh images of justice and images of common life.” He sees—and urges others to see—a direct relationship between the imagination and public policy: “American writing, including poetry, is urgently about what we care about in all kinds of ways. In some long run, new writing creates the values that are eventually going to seep into the larger culture. Romanticism passed through Wordsworth to Thoreau, Thoreau to John Muir, to Teddy Roosevelt, and then you’ve got national parks. But somebody had to see Yosemite and the Adirondacks that way before we understood that they had to be valued.”
