[In the following excerpt, Gliick discusses Hass's work in relation to that of Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz.]

Robinson Jeffers appears to be a poet other poets chastize eloquently. That is: the inducement to literary reprimand is in proportion to the stakes: the grander, the more fundamental the objection, the more inviting the project. The remarkable poems of this little genre, Milosz's and Hass's, are devoid of flamboyant condescension, at least insofar as the living can avoid flaunting their ongoing development at the immobile dead. "So brave in a void / you offered sacrifices to demons": so Milosz addresses Jeffers. If not exactly tribute, this is nevertheless a particular species of reproach: giant to giant.

The reprimand is moral: at issue is humanity, the definition thereof. And Jeffers' crime, in Milosz's poem, "to proclaim … an inhuman thing." Hass concurs, pretty much, though his formulation changes the emphasis, focusing on causes: "human anguish made him cold."

What's odd to me is that Jeffers in all his hardness and obstinate fixity and dogmatic revulsions is, of the three, the most poignantly, albeit cheerlessly, human.

I read Milosz in translation, which makes discussion of tone problematic. And yet, at issue in his poem to Jeffers is the placement of the speaker relative to his subjects and, in fact, Milosz speaks as a diplomat, an envoy, his mission being to explain, or represent, one form of paganism to another.

The paganism he defends is maternal. Earth centered. Moon centered. Fruitful. Predictable. Cyclical. This is the same fecund earth Hass reveres. Both approve it as the wise man approves woman, radiant in otherness. Homage to the source, the root, but homage paid, in Milosz, by someone well beyond primitive gesturing.

The mathematical equivalent of feminine earth is multiplication: increase, whatever its metaphoric manifestation, seems inherently life-affirming. Whereas the corresponding, the declared metaphor for Jeffers' earth, the "massive mysticism of stone," is elimination: a dead end, presumably.

Hass puts all this more eloquently: "though rock stands it does not breed." He sees the lure of rock but names its spiritual danger: sterility. To stand, to not breed, is to be finally inhuman, and, pragmatically, not lasting: the future of the species is more profitably assured through reproduction than through endurance. In Hass's mind, mutability, not fixity, sponsors ongoing existence. And yet the manner in which Jeffers espouses rock is immensely human: exposed, rash, extreme, vulnerable. Rigid, where Hass and Milosz are lithe-minded, evolved.

Jeffers writes out of enraged, disappointed romanticism: civilized in his expectations, he cannot forgive civilization in that it wasn't worth his faith. This can seem, to a reader, cumulatively trying: repetition deprives a last stand of its dramatic force.

Whereas Hass characteristically resists resolution: a mark of intellect, but also a temperamental inclination which can create its own form of stasis, in that it lacks not motion but momentum.

Hass hates disappointment, hates being imprisoned in its continuing and limited range of attitudes, of tones: rue, regret, plangent lament. When Hass sighs in Praise he does so with a kind of savage fury, constrained by perspective, by habitual poise; in these moments, he comes closest to being what Milosz has always been, since to write as an ancient soul is to write as an ironist (the alternative, I suppose, being to sing the purest and briefest of lyrics—).

Hass's method of poetic development has always been exposure: he uses his empathetic capacity to extend his range. Though he is not, I think, at home in irony (unless there is irony in the Buddha's composure), he has most certainly, as Milosz's translator, been exposed to its most subtle and resourceful practitioner.

Hass and Milosz have in common astounding intellectual gifts and the virtuoso's mastery of tone which contrives to endow natural speech with a sometimes unbelievable subtext of resonances. But the sources of flexibility differ: Milosz's detachment differs from Hass's empathy, as irony is distinct from ambivalence.

It will be interesting to see whether Hass ripens into the sort of poet Milosz is: ironic, but with an irony by turns delicate, malicious, passionate, judgmental, tender. He already has Milosz's 360-degree gaze, as opposed to Jeffers' fixity.

Jeffers' ferocity is alien to Hass; his landscapes less so. Like Jeffers, Hass is attracted to the absence of the human. There have been, from the first, counterparts in Hass to Jeffers' harsh, unpopulated world. And this is an aspect of the work even in Field Guide, even before human presence or human agency come to be characterized as that contaminating "steady thoughtlessness." But where Jeffers' imagination settles on rock and hawk, Hass gives us frog and pond, a bowl of oranges. Into these worlds, human beings, men and women, come as intrusions.

Most poets are, in Frost's phrase, acquainted with the night. Hass is unique in having inhabited, as an adult, a sunlit world. Exiled from Eden, he's like the man who's always been healthy and gets sick: when the amazement passes, he simply can't stand feeling this way. And the tonal problem of Praise, the collection that registers this change, is to avoid petulant irritability.

The earlier work, "The Return of Robinson Jeffers," is built around a move typical of Hass's work, early and late, an extended enactment of empathy. Hass imagines Jeffers' return from death: "I imagine him thinking …": so the meditation starts. Hass's projected epiphany duplicates Milosz's bias; this is not curious, since they address the same figure, the same perceived limitation. Jeffers, in Hass's imagination, "… feels pain as rounding at the hips, as breasts." And the form reeducation takes is the birth of feminine empathy and suffering to replace male arrogance.

It is either very touching, very feminine (on this grid) or extremely arrogant that Hass prefers to imagine these revelations as occurring to Jeffers himself, while at the same time refusing to abandon his own position as narrating, as sponsoring intelligence: the epiphany occurs in Hass's imagination. The fact is, Hass has learned much from Jeffers. There are tastes in common: the long, rhythmic, complicated sentences, with subsequent sentences beginning on a repeated phrase, like a thread picked up in a complex tapestry, so that one is always aware of, always hearing the human voice (the danger of complex syntax being that voice will be lost and, with it, intimacy, directness). The similarities are, in any case, easy to hear, for all the difference in ambiance: "…. what a festival for the seafowl. / What a witches' sabbath of wings / Hides the water." That's Jeffers, but Hass has moments very like.

What Hass does, what no one else now writing does with such skill, is a kind of spiritual ventriloquism: he is able to project not merely voice but a whole sensibility. On the surface, this resembles Keats's ideas of negative capability; in fact, it differs profoundly from Keats, in motive and effect. Always Keats's excursions conclude, and the act of conclusion marks a restoration of self. This is the romantic journey: it might be, it can be imagined, it is not. Hass may assert the fact of limitation, but limitation does not seem to be an attribute of the voice. And the romantic sound is not one Hass seems especially eager to make. His poems are, regularly, a flight from self; what they lack, when they lack anything, is a sense of the restrictions of self, of singleness, which perception necessitates acts of judgment, decision, assertion of priorities. His poems repudiate self in its romantic role: bedrock, shaping principle.