[In the following excerpt, Stitt argues that Praise illustrates the development of the American poem in terms of organic structure and ingenuity.]

In Praise, Robert Hass combines rather radically two complementary trends present in the progress of American poetry since the nineteenth century. In terms of imagery and statement, he is willing to include anything demanded by the poem, no matter its source, no matter how subtle or tenuous its relevance. In terms of structure, he is carrying the idea of the organic poem to ever-increasing degrees of linearity. The idea of a well-made poem generally includes the concept of circularity; all is preconceived, blue-printed, nothing enters by happenstance; the end refers to the beginning, all questions are answered, nothing is left dangling, a circle is formed. The organic poem, by contrast, grows as a tree grows, responding to the necessities of environment; its logic is internal, discovered along the way, never preconceived. When the organic poem achieves linearity, as is often the case in Hass, its end may neither resemble nor remember nor refer to its beginning; questions may go unanswered, all things may be left dangling; we stop at the end of the line on a one-way trip to somewhere.

Probably the best poem of this sort in Praise is "Not Going to New York: A Letter." The poem is a kind of linear, internal meditation; whatever occurs to the mind of the poet along the way is integrated into the flow. Memory and present observation combine to assist in explaining why the speaker is staying at home. His childhood comes into it, and his grandmother, recently dead—for whom the poem is a kind of elegy. Towards the end these elements come together in a surprising way to produce a superb comment on the nature of poetry. Given the character of this form, its dense unity, my quotation must of necessity be long; we enter as the speaker's son touches the "Withered cheek" of his father's grandmother:

she looked at him awhile and patted his cheek back and winked
and said to me, askance: "Old age ain't for sissies."
This has nothing to do with the odd terror in my memory.
It only explains it—the way this early winter weather
makes life seem more commonplace and—at a certain angle—
more intense. It is not poetry where decay and a created
radiance lie hidden inside words the way that memory
folds them into living. "O Westmoreland thou art a summer bird
that ever in the haunch of winter sings the lifting up of day."
Pasternak translated those lines. I imagine Russian summer,
the smell of jasmine drifting toward the porch. I would like
to get on a plane, but I would also like to sit on the porch
and watch one shrink to the hovering of gulls and glint
in the distance, circle east toward snow and disappear.
He would have noticed the articles as a native speaker wouldn't:
a bird, the haunch; and understood a little what persists
when eyes half-closed, lattice-shadow on his face,
he murmured the phrase in the dark vowels of his mother tongue.

I don't intend to interpret these remarkable lines, but want only to point out their linear, flowing, organic, inclusive structure.

Hass is not the only poet who has tried this kind of thing, but is remarkable for the extent to which he has done it. And yet the book is far from a consistent success. Hass is at his best when the complexity of his theme and the density of his language and imagery combine to help him attain a heightened form of expression. In the poems where this happens—among them are "Heroic Simile," "Against Botticelli," "The Pure Ones," and "Old Dominion"— he is very good indeed. In other poems he seems content to accumulate commonplace images and ideas; the result, as in "The Beginning of September" and "Songs to Survive the Summer," is a chatty, low-key, unengaging linearity. The book is a strange disappointment on the whole, but only because some of its parts are so surpassingly good. In the future let us hope that Hass will keep the pressure on, in all his poems.