Let me be blunt: the recent publication of Robert Hass' Praise marks the emergence of a major American poet. If his first book, Field Guide,… did not provoke such acclaim, this second book will. But first, keeping in mind that—as the cliché goes—a poet's strengths are inextricably bound up with his weaknesses, I would like to preface my reading of Praise with a rather extensive critical précis of the strengths and weaknesses of the first book. (p. 2)

Field Guide, especially when read against the second book, Praise, reveals two aesthetics that present the book as divided against itself: (1) poetry as description (as we understand it from certain late eighteenth century English poets—Thomson, Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper—down to the present) and (2) poetry as moral or political statement (as is adumbrated, for example, in Yvor Winters' In Defense of Reason). This is, of course, a simplistic...