Robert Hass Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Shapiro

Critical Essay by Alan Shapiro

SOURCE: '"And There Are Always Melons,' Some Thoughts on Robert Hass," in Chicago Review, Vol. 33, No. 3, Winter, 1983, pp. 84-90.

In the following essay, Shapiro illustrates how Hass's strengths—his intellectuality and his ability to render experience—are often at odds with each other in his poetry.

One of the strengths of Robert Hass's work is his great ability to describe the world around him. Yet much of his interest in description proceeds from a disturbing desire (which gets complicated in his later work) to live wholly in a world of sensory experience and from a concomitant distrust of intellectuality. This distrust may seem surprising, as Hass is a plainly intellectual writer. His poems abound with references to books, films, paintings and music: his great temptation is to prefer representations of experience to experience itself, a temptation for which description serves as an antidote. Take, for instance, "Spring," a poem...
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