The nation's next official cheerleader for all things verse will be Robert Hass, a 53-year-old Berkeley professor, translator, critic and poet. The eighth person to hold the post of poet laureate, Hass responded with the by-now-traditional trepidation when approached by Library of Congress officials.

"My first reaction was reluctance," Hass admitted by phone from the University of Iowa, where he is teaching in the Writers' Workshop this semester.

"It's a great honor and it seemed like a massive distraction," he said. "But it was also an opportunity to be a spokesperson for the literary community."

As for his duties? "I cannot even say I know what my task is." He'll spend from now until October, when he officially starts at the library, figuring it out.

Rita Dove, the outgoing laureate, has some basic advice for Hass: Don't get overwhelmed. Early in her two-year stint, she was twice hospitalized from exhaustion. "I got kind of used to writing in the front of ambulances," the 42-year-old Dove said lightly during an interview last week at her office in the library.

Both incidents happened in the summer of 1993, after she was selected and had endured the initial onslaught of media attention but before she learned to pace herself.

The first time was at a writers' conference in Squaw Valley, Calif., where the altitude was blamed. The second was at home in Charlottesville, when Dove was trying to answer hundreds of letters from an eager public before traveling to the West Coast.

"I fainted, passed out, and [her husband] Fred couldn't rouse me," she remembered. "I woke up in the morning and then immediately went out again." The first thing she did after coming home from the hospital that afternoon was another interview, propping herself up on the couch.

"What that told me is, don't overextend yourself, because then you aren't any good for anybody," Dove said. "I learned it's better to let the letters sit for three months, to answer them bit by bit."

One thing the outgoing and incoming laureates share is a belief in the power and the popularity of poetry. Said Hass: "I often feel when I'm in the East that people talk about the situation of writing as if it were in trouble. But from my perspective it seems pretty healthy. First of all, there's a lot of urgent and interesting writing being done in a variety of modes. And there are audiences for it among people who don't live in the mass media."

His own poetry fits on a compact shelf: three books. The first, Field Guide, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The second, Praise, appeared in 1974. The most recent, Human Wishes, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry in 1990. "I never wanted to have, like John Updike said about T. S. Eliot, 'a reluctant oeuvre,' but I do seem to be slow," the poet said. "I tend to write a lot and throw away a lot."

What remains has been praised. "He writes in many shapes, moods, even styles. Yet everywhere one recognizes this reverence for the power of language, words in their full-flight of syntax, what we—or our ancestors—used to call eloquence," wrote Hayden Carruth in Harper's magazine.

Hass, who was born in San Francisco and has lived near there most of his life, is the first laureate from the West Coast. "In some ways I take this as a representative honor—that I'm to stand for a whole bunch of writers and a tradition of writing," he said.

Like everything else in the West, poetry doesn't have much of a past. Robinson Jeffers, issuing his jeremiads against the modern world in the first decades of the century, is the first real California poet. It wasn't until the '50s that a critical mass of poets developed, and almost immediately San Francisco rivaled New York as the poetry capital of the country.

"It was an incredibly lively place to grow up wanting to be a writer," said the new laureate. "And there were people around, audiences, so it didn't feel like a strange vocation."

It also didn't feel like an insular activity. Hass has reached out both to Japan, translating a book of haiku, and to Europe, where he has collaborated with Czeslaw Milosz to render seven of the Nobel laureate's collections into English. "I'm really not very good at any language," he confessed. "Sometimes I say I don't really translate but I 'de-Polandize' other people's poems."

In 1984, Hass won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism for Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. Unlike most poets, he is also a frequent reviewer. "Writing prose is a way of engaging questions about the practice of poetry in the life of readers. It's all part of the same enterprise—trying to live imaginatively in poetry and in my time."

Now, as laureate, he'll be seeking ways to help others live in poetry as well. While Dove has expanded the position, it's still stuck with the sort of vagueness that nearly every previous laureate and, before 1986, what was then termed the "consultant in poetry" has complained about. James Dickey, consultant from 1966 to '68, once said he had finally figured his role: "You walk around so people can point to you and say, 'That's him.'"

Yet why should the poet laureate's task be clearly defined when the very place of verse in our national life has been endlessly debated? It's booming, it's in decline, the audience has never been bigger, the audience has never been smaller, everyone's writing it, no one's reading it, no one cares, everyone should care.

Dove elevated the post of laureate by bringing a new level of energy to the chronically underfunded and largely ceremonial position. In return for a $35,000 annual stipend—a sum that hasn't changed in a decade—the laureate is required only to give one reading, deliver one lecture and organize a reading series.

But Dove went far beyond this in being intensely visible, at least for a poet. She appeared on "Sesame Street" and with Garrison Keillor, read at the White House and worked with schoolchildren on closed-circuit TV, and wrote and delivered a poem for a ceremony commemorating the restoration of the Freedom Statue on the Capitol.

This happened partly because Dove, as a black woman, was a symbol in ways that Hass, a white man, cannot be, but it was also due to her enormous energy. She figures she did more than 200 interviews and personally answered more than 2,000 letters about poetry.

She did this without much institutional support. While the Library of Congress gives great lip service to the program, in recent years the laureate's staff has been cut in half—from two people to one. (Dove also had help from her secretary at the University of Virginia, as well as considerable assistance of all sorts from her husband Fred, a novelist.)

Unlike some of her predecessors, however, Dove declined to blame the library's management for a failure to offer more assistance. Instead, she wondered if the media had fully done their job. While a tremendous amount of coverage was focused on her, there was relatively little on her programs. A poetry and jazz festival that drew 200 people, a ceremony involving eight young Crow Indian poets from Montana reciting their verse in full regalia—these received minimal or no attention.

"It seems to me that interest in a lot of things is created by focusing attention on them," Dove said. "I felt that if you give people half a chance to like poetry, they will."