Robert Hass has been named the poet laureate of the United States by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. Mr. Hass, the author of the poetry collections Field Guide, Praise and Human Wishes, succeeds Rita Dove, whose second one-year term as poet laureate ends this month.

"It's a daunting honor," said Mr. Hass (whose name rhymes with grass), in a telephone interview from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he is teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop for the spring semester. "On the one hand, I'm quite pleased, and on the other I'm fearful of the distraction. I think Joseph Brodsky said that the job is ill-paid, ill-defined and irresistible." Mr. Brodsky was the poet laureate in 1991.

The post of poet laureate was created in 1937 to provide the Librarian of Congress with advice on the library's poetry collection, but in recent years it has come to be regarded as a platform for raising national awareness of the importance of poetry and the written word. Laureates receive a salary of $35,000. By design, their duties are loosely defined except for the requirement that they give a reading of their work at the Library of Congress upon assuming the job, deliver an address upon stepping down and organize literary programs at the library. Mr. Hass will open the library's annual literary series on Oct. 12.

Mr. Hass's poetry reflects what he once described in an essay as "the pure activity of being alive." He is deeply concerned with the nuances of perception and the potential for language to adequately describe the sensory and emotional landscape. His subjects tend to be humble and close to home: the landscape of northern California, the routines of family life, the love between men and women.

Carolyn Kizer, writing about Mr. Hass in The New York Times Book Review, called him the master of the "reticule poem," alluding to his gift for weaving together seemingly unrelated objects, events and images. He once wrote in an essay on poetic images that in the best poetry, "what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that sensation is a feeling of release from the self."

Mr. Hass, who is 54, was born in San Francisco and earned a bachelor's degree from St. Mary's College in Moraga, Calif., and a master's and a doctorate from Stanford University. He taught at the State University at Buffalo from 1967 to 1971, and at St. Mary's College from 1971 to 1989, when he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.

Mr. Hass attracted notice with his first book, Field Guide, a collection of lyric encounters with the California landscape. The book was published the year after he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His two other poetry collections, Praise (1979) and Human Wishes, which also includes a section of short prose meditations (1989), where published to wide acclaim. His essay collection, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1985), won the National Book Critics Award for criticism.

For the last decade he has devoted much of his time to translating the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, working closely with the author. He has also published The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (1994).

"I don't know how much you can do in a year," Mr. Hass said. "I hope I can intensify people's sense of the vitality and importance of American writing of all kinds."