[In the following review, Hirsch discusses the essays and reviews collected in Hass's Twentieth Century Pleasures, considering what they reveal about Hass and his work.]

Recently, I wrote a memorial speech for a close friend who had died of cancer. Reading the piece aloud, I discovered that I could deliver it with a modicum of calmness when I was speaking in generalities, but that I wavered whenever specific images of him were summoned up: my friend giving me a high five at a basketball game, or carrying a steaming cup of coffee across campus in the early evening. These images were so clear and palpable that I could feel him in front of me again. "Images haunt," Robert Hass tells us in Twentieth Century Pleasures. They are also, by their very nature, phenomenal, standing for nothing else but themselves, reaching down into the well of being and affirming, this is. It is a permanently startling fact that language can give us back parts of our own world, full-bodied. "Images are powers," Hass also writes, emphasizing that they are metonymic glimpses, fundamental acts of imagination, moments of pure being. The image is the primary pigment of the lyric poet and in its purest form it is the enemy of time, of discourse, of all narratives that seek to surround and distill it. No wonder that an image could cut the fabric of a memorial speech. Yeats claimed that the intensity of images actively bordered on the visionary, an intersection between two worlds. In a different tradition, one of Tu Fu's colleagues told him, "It is like being alive twice."

The nature of the image—its surprising fullness of being and phenomenological significance—is one of the leitmotifs of Twentieth Century Pleasures, Robert Hass's collection of prose pieces about poetry. The book brings together ten essays and four reviews, all of which were commissioned by various editors over the past five years, and consequently it has the character of an omnibus, weaving together a number of essays about individual poets—Lowell, Wright, Tranströmer, Kunitz, Milosz, Rilke, and others—with a memoir about the San Francisco Bay Area as a cultural region and three larger meditations about poetic form, prosody and rhythm, and images. Most of these essays are what used to be called "appreciations"—if we mean by the term something along the order of Randall Jarrell's essays on Frost, Auden, and Whitman. Like Jarrell, Hass is often at his best when he is both reconsidering a poet's work and rescuing it from a myriad of surrounding assumptions. His extended meditation on "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," for example, should forever lay to rest the received opinion that Lowell's early poems "clearly reflect the dictates of the new criticism" while the later ones are "less consciously wrought" and "more intimate." In a somewhat different vein, his indispensable essay on James Wright helps to define the inward alertness, luminous intelligence, and clarity of feeling in Wright's work; but it also unmasks some of the unspoken assumptions and limitations in his aesthetic, in particular the unconscious insistence on a "radical and permanent division between the inner and outer" worlds. For Hass, this Calvinist division—which is anyway denied by Wright's best work—is one of the recurrent problems in American poetry. Indeed, Twentieth Century Pleasures is held together not only by Hass's uniquely personal and unified sensibility, but also by his ongoing conviction that the division between inner and outer can be healed in post-romantic poetry and that human inwardness needs to find a viable shape in the external world. One of his persistent concerns is the relationship between looking and being, his sense of how the image comes together and how the mind—through the medium of the lyric poem—recovers and creates form.

Hass is the most intimate and narrative of critics—each of his essays begins with a personal example or story—and he writes with an unusually vivid sense that "Poems take place in your life, or some of them do, like the day your younger sister arrives and replaces you as the bon enfant in the bosom of the family…." So, too, he writes always as a man situated in a particular place at a particular time, a Wordsworthian poet, only partially off-duty, who is taking a specific occasion—a symposium, the publication of a book—to think about his art. As a native Californian with a formalist training (Kenneth Rexroth and Yvor Winter are two California presences who shaped his sensibility), Hass often seems to be standing at the edge of the continent, facing west. Throughout Twentieth Century Pleasures the Japanese haiku poets serve as his primary touchstones and models. Thus Chekhov's notebook entries are praised for being "close to the temperament" of Japanese poets, and Whitman's "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" is demonstrated to be "in the spirit" of Buson; Gary Snyder's "August on Sourdough, A Visit from Dick Brewer" is located in a tradition of Oriental leave-taking poems, and James Wright's "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" is compared to a haiku by Basho which gets at the same feeling. Hass's essay on "Images"—which is the concluding and arguably the most important piece in the book—weaves together a series of radiant personal memories with a mini-discussion of Japanese poetics. Poems by Buson, Issa, and Basho are the essential examples in his argument that images are not so much "about" anything as they are things-in-themselves, "equal in status with being and the mysteriousness of being." At times Hass sounds like an intuitive Bachelard, a phenomenologist transplanted to California and turned into a mid-century American poet.

One recurrent problem for modern poets is the relationship between image and discourse, epiphanic moment and narrative time, song and story. Hass is particularly alert to the issue, noting in one piece that "The Cantos are a long struggle between image and discourse" and in another that "Winters never solved for himself the problem of getting from image to discourse in the language of his time." The problem is crucial for poets who seek to transcend Imagism (and deep Imagism) and want to carve forms in time, to build from the individual to the community and to incorporate into their work aspects of natural, social, political, and historical life. The "perilousness of our individual lives," Hass declares, "is what makes the insight of the isolated lyric untenable." One of the secondary dramas in Twentieth Century Pleasures is watching the essays circle the problem of image and discourse, finding different solutions in different poets. Thus, Hass argues that Tranströmer's Baltics solves the problem through a series of wandering fragments or islands, Wordsworth's Prelude by knitting together being and looking, giving the poet's own inwardness "a local habitation and a name." He finds that Rilke finally lets the world come flooding through him in the Duino Elegies and that Milosz circumnavigates the problem in "Separate Notebooks," continually returning to the issue of "whether one should try to rescue being from the river of time by contemplating or embracing it." The Japanese haiku poets serve as another type of model by organizing their anthologies seasonally; as a result each poem reaches out "toward an absolute grasp of being" but also takes its place in a larger seasonal cycle. In this way the stillness of the moment is given special poignance by the velocity of time. What is crucial to Hass in all of these works is the basic idea of poetic form, the mind making connections, creating rhythmic texture and shape out of diverse fragments.

Twentieth Century Pleasures begins by discussing the difficulty of talking about favorite poems, and it ends by affirming "the fullness and emptiness of being." Its very title sets itself against our twentieth-century experience of fragmentation, and one of the book's key subjects is the mind's capacity for "wonder and repetition," the way the best poems can focus an attentive and self-forgetful consciousness. Hass's own most successful poetic mode has been the meditative lyric which, as he notes in an essay on Stanley Kunitz's work, "can step a little to the side and let the world speak through it, and the world has no need to cry 'Let be! Let be!' because it is." Hass has an acute sense of the perils of twentieth-century history, but this is always tempered by his abiding faith in "the absolute value of being." He has a long memory for happiness and returns often to experiences of well-being, radiance, fullness, health. As his most well-known poem, "Meditation at Lagunitas," puts it: "There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing…." Twentieth Century Pleasures is informed by a deep faith that the greatest poems can capture the numinousness of the world and ultimately it is this faith which makes Robert Hass a critic—as well as a poet—of praise.