Robert Hass Critical Essay | United States Poet Laureate

Critical Review by Edward Hirsch

SOURCE: "Praise," in Poetry, Vol. CXLV, No. 6, March, 1985, pp. 345-48.

[In the following review, Hirsch discusses the essays and reviews collected in Hass's Twentieth Century Pleasures, considering what they reveal about Hass and his work.]

Recently, I wrote a memorial speech for a close friend who had died of cancer. Reading the piece aloud, I discovered that I could deliver it with a modicum of calmness when I was speaking in generalities, but that I wavered whenever specific images of him were summoned up: my friend giving me a high five at a basketball game, or carrying a steaming cup of coffee across campus in the early evening. These images were so clear and palpable that I could feel him in front of me again. "Images haunt," Robert Hass tells us in Twentieth Century Pleasures. They are also, by their very nature, phenomenal, standing for nothing else but...
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