SOURCE: "Arguing in Unknown Quantities," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4276, March 15, 1985, pp. 293-94.

[In the following excerpt, Davis commends Hass for a collection that demonstrates his desire "to serve poetry—not appropriate it or crow over it or show off at its expense."]

We enter a different world, and one I think most readers of poetry would much rather live in, when we open Robert Hass's Twentieth Century Pleasures; his first sentence, "It's probably a hopeless matter, writing about favourite poems", establishes the tone—colloquial, welcoming, inviting complicity; and if you don't have favourite poems read no further. Hass is a poet himself and it shows; his love for poetry, his intimate awareness of how it is made and the kinds of effects it is capable of, are obvious on almost every page. This [book] … constantly sent me back with fresh understanding to poems I thought I...