SOURCE: "Fool, Thou Poet," in Hudson Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Winter, 1973-74, pp. 717-34.

In the following excerpt, Young comments on Hass's use of "naming," or providing a catalogue of nature, in Field Guide.

With no gods all their own and with the total breakdown of their civic world as a vehicle of continuing aspiration (or even as a consolatory place to live out the day), American writers in greater number are turning to the wilderness as their one great external source of unadulterated poetry. Joyce Carol Oates … asks, in one of her intelligent and lovely poems, "Is all space so empty? / must we fill it with ourselves?" Of course: only so it can be habitable. To fill it, you'd need a heap of majesty; to inhabit it, with any hope of definition as poet, you begin by finding names for its manifestations. This is what Robert Hass...