[In the following essay, Shapiro illustrates how Hass's strengths—his intellectuality and his ability to render experience—are often at odds with each other in his poetry.]

One of the strengths of Robert Hass's work is his great ability to describe the world around him. Yet much of his interest in description proceeds from a disturbing desire (which gets complicated in his later work) to live wholly in a world of sensory experience and from a concomitant distrust of intellectuality. This distrust may seem surprising, as Hass is a plainly intellectual writer. His poems abound with references to books, films, paintings and music: his great temptation is to prefer representations of experience to experience itself, a temptation for which description serves as an antidote. Take, for instance, "Spring," a poem from his first book, Field Guide:

We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores, You
asked mildly, "Bob, who is Uggo Betti?"
A bearded bird-like man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Uggo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. Dusk was
a huge weird phosphorescent beast
dying slowly out across the bay.
Our house waited and our books,
the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.
After dinner I read one anyway.
You chanted, "Uggo Betti has no bones,"
and when I said, "The limits of my language
are the limits of my world," you laughed.
We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.

The poem turns on the illusion in line five that the "bearded bird-like man" is the answer to the question, who is Uggo Betti. Not until line nine do we realize that he's only someone who can explain who Uggo Betti is. This ambiguity reflects Hass's uneasy sense of culture—which this man embodies—as a kind of second-hand experience. Sensuously forbidding ("priestly") and wearing a raincoat on a sunny day, this explainer is cut off from the physical world, but also metaphorically protected from its weirdness, its evanescence, in part the source of its beauty. The implication is that art not only compensates us for the change on which the brute world is predicated, but is also a prophylactic against sensuality. And Hass indicates the insufficiency of art's compensation by characterizing his books as "skinny little soldiers" opposing the "huge beast" of evening, and by frankly characterizing the man's words about Uggo Betti and his own about language as tiresome, especially when set next to the attractive "slow dying" of the dusk, and the sexual talk that concludes the poem.

The poem shows rhetorical skill: Hass draws the syntax through the free-verse lines expressively, and the contrast between the man and the evening is nicely balanced. But the thinking that animates the poem warrants skepticism: to set sex against reading is like Yeats' specious proposition that one must choose between perfection of the art, or of the life. Devotion to the artifacts of consciousness does not necessarily limit or impair our sensuality. If it did, Paola and Francesca would not have gotten into such hot water.

But this is Hass's difficulty. He is tempted toward an excess of thought, not feeling. It's not surprising that he should be aware of the dangerous (and in some respects inevitable) limitations too much reflection can impose. This awareness, though, too often leads to an equally limiting and formulaic glorification of immediacy, as at the end of "Graveyard Near Bolinas":

… The sun was on my neck.
Some days it's not so hard to say
the quick pulse of blood
through living flesh
is all there is.

"Some days" implies that most days it's damn hard to say there's nothing more permanent or meaningful than the blood's pulse. But this implied struggle is only vaguely gestured at. The speaker gives an amusing account of some of the grave markers ("Eliza Binns is with Christ, which is better"), and some good description. But the details and the humor indicate little of the struggle which the conclusion suggests and from which the poem draws its power. Consequently, that power comes across as unearned and inflated, a product of the rhetoric only.

Hass employs a similar rhetorical strategy (with more success) at the end of "Meditation at Lagunita," a later poem and perhaps his very best. The poem, impressive for the terrain it covers in so few lines, has all the provisional feel of an ongoing meditation, of a mind making discoveries as it goes from thought to thought, forcing each proposition toward the exception that informs and qualifies it. Yet Hass's qualifications emerge less from rhetoric than from a desire to keep an honest account as he moves over his subject:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clownfaced
woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world of
undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds
a word is elegy to what it signifies. …

He opens wryly with two examples of "the new thinking": the first derives from the scholastic notion of haecceity—that each particular, by its presence, represents a falling away from a realm of seamless purity, of "undivided light"; the second, also derived from scholasticism, is the nominalist notion that in the representation of the thing the word is, at best, "elegy to what it signifies." What we have then is a double erasure—the general truth erased by each particular, and each particular erased by the word that refers to it.

So far the thinking, abstracted from the particulars of actual experience, has been archly academic, just the kind of thinking Hass indulges in often and consequently so distrusts. What he is really commenting on here is just this tendency in himself toward a rarefied intellectuality, a kind of talking so removed from experience (even when experience is the subject) that the word, indeed, becomes elegy to what it signifies. And he goes on to say:

… After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I.

In moving from the general concept to the particular pronouns, the list of words recapitulates the movement of the whole poem, and it enables him to turn associatively to a personal experience, to rethink the same problems in terms more integral to his life:

Testing the philosophical assumptions about loss against his own experience, he realizes that the woman was in many ways incidental to the associations she evoked. Yet the associations are problematic: what are we to make of "a thirst for salt, for my childhood river"? If she arouses in him a desire to return to some preconscious state, then perhaps these details are related in terms of water: the fresh water of the river, the salt water of the embryonic fluid. "A thirst for salt" may also express a thirst for thirst, a desire for desire. In either case, this woman arouses in him a longing for some inaccessible state where there are no divisions between word and thing, "you" and "I," and where there is, therefore, no loss. This test-case, then, would seem to support the assumptions on which the poem began. But, determined to prevent these assumptions from simplifying his recollection, he keeps pushing his thought toward the exceptions:

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing,
such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Although the intimate details he now recalls "the thing her father said," "what she dreamed"—are representations of other experiences, the representations are particular experiences themselves (he makes a similar perception in "The Beginning of September" when he says "Words are abstract, but words are abstract is a dance, car crash, heart's delight"). There are times, he realizes, when the divisions we assume between experience and representations of experience, self and other, word and thing, do not matter; instead of longing, which implies distance and privation, at such times the good flesh can continue.

Throughout Praise, his second book, Hass's distrust, which in his earlier work takes a decidedly anti-intellectual turn, now deepens to become a habit of feeling. What he fears and is now drawn to is desire as longing, as privation. And this, he knows, is not restricted to any one realm of experience. In art, it manifests itself as the desire to sieve out of process some object that will point to a transcendent meaning, to an undivided light; in strictly intellectual matters, it is the desire to escape from the ambiguities and complexities of experience through some single principle or absolute; in love, it is the impossible desire to get out of the self.

Hass now sets as a kind of ideal those experiences associated with "continuing pleasure" rather than epiphanic ones. He seeks to confide in experiences that are larger and more inclusive than the unique occasion. For instance, in "The Beginning of September," it is the mastery of setting the table: "Spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined." In "Transparent Garments," in which he rejects the romantic pursuit of darkness (inanimate being) on the one hand, and light (pure spirituality) on the other, he desires to emerge in a non-symbolic landscape where "the juniper is simply juniper." Likewise, in "Songs to Survive the Summer," the light he's drawn to is terrestrial, it is the light "of all things lustered by the steady thoughtlessness of human use," not the undivided light of "Meditation at Lagunitas"; and in "Santa Lucia," what he or rather what his speaker wants "happens not when the deer freezes," that is, not at the revelatory moment isolated from time, but "when she flicks her ears and starts to feed again," returning to the continuous, normative act.

But continuity is an ideal Hass will have trouble realizing. As he says in "Songs to Survive the Summer," he's caught in the war between "Dailiness and desire," between a craving for the intensity of the climactic moment and an equally strong desire to repose in traditions—continuous, time-honored practices—that embrace more of life than the discrete occasion. This ambivalence produces a curious stylistic mix, tending on the one hand toward a prose inclusiveness, and on the other, within the framework of that inclusiveness, toward a reliance upon the fragment and the list as primary organizing principles. Even when he argues for the continuous and ordinary … the argument takes the form of fragmentary impressions. But impressions are not traditions. And this impressionistic method pushes the poem toward the very isolation Hass is attempting to reject. It tends toward the unique and isolated occasion, not the normative one which, by definition, depends on recurrence, on the connections between things in addition to the things themselves. In other words, there seems to be an essential disjunction between his method and what he wants that method to accomplish. And it is this disjunction that accounts for the uncertainty and confusion that one meets on almost every page of Praise.

A thoughtful and often moving writer, and an immediately appealing one too, Hass is traditional insofar as he is willing to draw upon resources that the past (nonliterary as well as literary) makes available. Works of art, history, philosophy, are joined to personal details in order to make sense of his own experience. And to accommodate this eclectic interest, he has been gravitating toward an inclusive proselike style of composition. But within this style he relies principally on impression and on the juxtaposition of fragmentary details (literary techniques associated with imagist and post-imagist practices). And this I think not only limits the effectiveness of his eclecticism, it frustrates and defeats at times the intentions that lead him to the inclusive style. If he truly desires to bring his art closer to the center of life where "the good flesh continues," he will have to develop a method of composition that is not so inextricably bound up with the intensity of the marginal and momentary, a method that is not, in other words, a kind of formalization of longing itself.