Poetry Quote by Robert Hass — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking”

“August is dust here. Drought”

“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.”

“Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.”

“at first when the rain fell”

“It is not our job to remain whole.”

“First, I thought, almost despairing,”

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:”

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”

“I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,”