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Chapter 4: Robert Hass: Statement and Image
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Chapter Four Robert Hass Statement and Image A “Wynged Wondre” Robert Hass’s career seems almost to have been designed to disprove Chaucer’s claim that poetic fame is a “wynged wondre faste fleen.” Critical and popular favor arrived, for Hass, on wondrously fast wings, but they have not fled, nor do they show any signs of so doing. Hass has been one of the boy wonders of American poetry since before the appearance of his first book, and he has not yet seen a slump in the opinions of the loose affiliation of reviewers, editors, and critics who comprise the American poetic establishment . Many of the bright-eyed young men and women whose first book wins the Yale Younger Poets Award may hope, with some reason, for further validation to follow in the form of an appearance in a major anthology. Such was the precocity of Robert Hass that his poetry actually appeared in an important anthology five years before it was to win the Yale prize in 1973. Since that time he has received many of the more prestigious prizes and fellowships for poetry and kept pace with the omnipresent Robert Pinsky in terms of MLA citations and anthology appearances, earning his Norton Anthology stripes in 1984. He was named U.S. Poet Laureate 99 earlier than his contemporary Pinsky, too, and served two terms from 1995 to 1997. Why such a sudden and consistent success? Certainly, talent has something to do with it, but we all know of remarkably talented poets whose work has gone unappreciated. We have seen a certain irony in the fact that the neo-Augustan poetics inherited by Pinsky from the ever-marginal Winters made Pinsky a critical and popular success. While Hass was never so Augustan as the author of “Essay on Psychiatrists ” and An Explanation of America, his success with the critical and reading publics has, like Pinsky’s, much to do with what he learned from Winters at Stanford in the 1960s. While Hass never took up Wintersian Augustanism, he did engage with his mentor seriously. What Hass took from Winters, though, was not a coherent set of poetics, and still less was it a coherent and prescriptive moral philosophy. What Hass took from Winters was instead a set of recurring themes and oppositions, more or less in their original Wintersian form. The most important of these are a concern with the distinction between realist and nominalist views of language as well as a concern with the competing claims of the physical world and the individual intelligence. Winters had very definite opinions about these matters, choosing in his late career a dogmatically realist view of language and an equally dogmatic view of the claims of the individual intellect (with its acts of moral judgment) over the claims of the physical world. Hass took up this Wintersian matrix of thought but did so without adopting his mentor’s opinions and dogmas about these themes. In fact, it is often difficult to determine Hass’s exact positions on the themes that he took from Winters. He is in this sense something of a poet of negative capability, able to negotiate “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats put it in his famous letter of 1817 (494). How Hass was able to take up Winters’ characteristic themes without any irritable reaching after dogma or certainty is by no means obvious. Dogma and certainty were, after all, the fundamental attractions of Winters’ thinking for many, if not most, of his followers. The answer lies in Hass’s lack of the kind of early trauma that Winters suffered during his convalescence from tuberculosis and the period of iso100 | Robert Hass [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:42 GMT) lation that followed. Winters developed his ideas about language and the morally active intellect while he was feeling acutely the possibility of the loss of meaning and identity. His hardened positions were the products of a deeply disturbing experience from which he may never have fully recovered. Hass, in contrast, encountered Winters’ ideas in a far more congenial and social environment. Moreover, Hass has by his own admission led a remarkably fortunate existence—he once even wrote that he has “had it easy” in life (Twentieth Century Pleasures 276). Because of this, he was able to fully absorb Winters’ key themes and ideas without needing to take up Winters’ hardened positions. He could become a...