[In the following review, Libby remarks favorably on Twentieth Century Pleasures.]

Twentieth-century pleasure is not precisely what we expect from a book of criticism, which often has a distinctly 19th-century quality and offers secondary pleasures at best. But as the California poet Robert Hass recounts and analyzes his complex joy in poets from Basho to Rilke to James Wright [in Twentieth Century Pleasures], he creates a very special pleasure of his own. This results partly from the almost fictional tendencies of his criticism. As Mr. Hass tends to locate poets in their times and places, so he locates his reading for us, giving up the illusion of objectivity to place the reading in his life. In a piece about Robert Lowell, Mr. Hass complains about the difficulty of judging the value of poetry "when it's gotten into the blood. It becomes autobiography then." So his criticism contains many snatches of autobiography, for instance as he introduces a study of the poetry and politics of Czeslaw Milosz with a memory of participating in a 1966 antinapalm demonstration or when he begins a piece on prosody with a quick, funny glance at dirty saloon repartee. Conversely, he writes only one overtly autobiographical piece for this collection, and it is mostly about poetry.

Mr. Hass's complexity shows not so much in his autobiographical gestures as in his thinking about the poems. We are conscious of a whole mind before us, presented in a style that is both elegant and plain, enlivened by a freely metaphorical imagination and magisterial one-liners. (About rhythm: "The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself.") Deep intelligence and wide knowledge serve Mr. Hass's particular vision of poetry, a vaguely Tory one that has been unfashionable for much of the past two decades, though it is coming dramatically into its own now.

Unlike the early modern Imagists and such recent neo-Surrea lists as Robert Bly, Mr. Hass cares more for the line than the image. Not that he opposes Surrealism, but he argues that what is genuinely basic, what gets to the unconscious, what defines "revolutionary ground," is rhythm more than visual representation, Mr. Hass admits that "images haunt," but he remains clearly less drawn to pictures than to ideas. This inclination has one unfortunate effect: the piece called "Images," despite some thoughtful meditations on haiku, is less compelling than the others. Even the tone of its personal reminiscences—which are too obviously rhetorically calculated, habitual—seems askew.

Another, more interesting effect of Mr. Hass's interest in thought is his ambivalence about modernism, partly an inheritance from the poet and critic Yvor Winters, with whom he briefly studied. But Mr. Hass moderates Winters's rather ill-tempered scorn for everything Romantic or post-Romantic. (He also does a little restorative work on Winters's image as a poet, trying in one review to remember "the fierce old curmudgeon of Palo Alto" as a young Romantic.) Whatever his position in the poetry wars, Mr. Hass remains devoted to the massive poems of modernism, like Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" or Rilke's "Duino Elegies." But because of his interest in the moral implications of ideas and because he locates poetry so squarely among the central experiences of existence, he worries about modernism's infatuation either with intense self-examination or with the inhuman—the darkness of instinct, not the light of reason, and finally death.

Mr. Hass argues with a rationalist's insistence on the value of reason as opposed to more mysterious ways of knowing. But unlike excessively rationalist critics, he understands precisely the appeal of mystery and admits the aesthetically generative power of dark forces in the self. Even while amusing himself by accusing Mr. Bly of describing "imagination as a kind of ruminative wombat," he tends to grant the general validity of Mr. Bly's Romantic insistence on the deep roots of poetry—though Mr. Hass insists that "the imagination is luminously intelligent." But there remains a problem. As he says in a moment of impatience in his wonderful essay on Rilke, at times he feels "a sudden restless revulsion from the whole tradition of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century poetry" because of its narcissistic obsession with inwardness and death.

The great skill of this critic is his willingness to entertain such judgments, as well as many small, fair, precise judgments of individual poems. His final intention is not merely to judge but to give a picture of the writer's mind. He begins with a balanced assessment of flaws in a particular vision and articulates a complex understanding of the way those flaws are inseparable from—genius. Among the transcendent contradictions of poetry, human or even esthetic weakness can be one of the springs of esthetic power.

Because he is so concerned with the absence of human relationships in so much poetry, Mr. Hass sometimes tends to welcome suggestions of sexual desire with an uncharacteristically uncritical enthusiasm. He is a stern judge of Surrealist sentimentalism about darkness and otherness, but when he finds traces of the erotic, Mr. Hass sometimes lets sentimentalism pass (in James Wright, for instance), and he does not always see the dangers of narcissism in the contemplation, especially male and abstract, of the sexual other. But it seems unduly crabby to insist on this small failing; let me suggest, as Mr. Hass does when he points to poetic flaws, that it is in ways inseparable from the strengths of Mr. Hass's own luminous sensibility.

Because of the range of that sensibility, many of these essays, especially the introduction to Rilke but even the rather too long discussion of prosody, are both interesting enough for a general audience and rigorous enough for professionals. Correspondingly, Mr. Hass's style balances conversational directness and eloquent complexity. However readers might argue with the details of his responses, his writing appeals. That comes naturally—if his highly self-conscious rhetoric can be described as natural—from his pleasure in poetry and in talking about poetry, always frankly mixed with enjoyment in talking about the self. The two are indivisible. Mr. Hass believes that poetry is what defines the self, and it is his ability to describe that process that is the heart of this book's pleasure.