A Poem by Sylvia Plath By Robert Hass March 15, 1998 The appearance of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters has gotten so much attention in the press that even my local baker asked me about it the other morning when I stopped for coffee. What's the deal he asked. My impulse was to lend him the book. I said that Ted Hughes was the English poet laureate, a Yorkshireman, that he wrote poems about the ...

A Poem by Horace By Robert Hass March 29, 1998 It's spring. And here's a chance to print a song of the season that comes from a very old, sunlit, Mediterranean sanity. Also a chance to celebrate a remarkable recent book. One of the poets central to the history of lyric poetry in the European tradition is Quintus Horatius Flaccus, whom we know as Horace. He was born when Rome was emerging as a ...

Nbsp The Poetry of Walt Whitman &nbsp &nbsp By Robert Hass February 8, 1998 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has been in the news again. Of course, if poetry is news that stays news, it should be. It is, after all, one of the great books in American literature, as wild, alive and surprising now as on the day it first appeared, and it's also a profound argument for the idea that the spirit of ...

A poem by Octavio Paz By Robert Hass April 26, 1998 I was in San Miguel de Allende in January when I heard that Octavio Paz was gravely ill. My hotel room had a rooftop patio. When I walked out onto it at dawn, 6, 000 feet up in the Sierra Madre, I looked out at a late Renaissance dome, 18th-century church spires, laundry lines, utility lines, black rooftop cats gazing with what seemed religious ...

A Poem for Independence Day By Ralph Waldo Emerson By Robert Hass July 5, 1998 Independence Day weekend, so I have been thinking about poetry and the creation of national memory. In the June 11 New York Review of Books there's a very interesting essay by historian Alexander Stille about the teaching of American history in our schools. It gives examples of the ways our national stories get told ...

Poems by Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop By Robert Hass August 9, 1998 A reader from Maryland writes to ask where the villanelle came from. I looked it up: a very old Italian folk song form brought into medieval French poetry and then brought into English by poets at the end of the 19th century. It is based on an intricate rhyme scheme and a schematic repetition of key lines. The effect is ...