[In the following excerpt, Young comments on Hass's use of "naming," or providing a catalogue of nature, in Field Guide.]

With no gods all their own and with the total breakdown of their civic world as a vehicle of continuing aspiration (or even as a consolatory place to live out the day), American writers in greater number are turning to the wilderness as their one great external source of unadulterated poetry. Joyce Carol Oates … asks, in one of her intelligent and lovely poems, "Is all space so empty? / must we fill it with ourselves?" Of course: only so it can be habitable. To fill it, you'd need a heap of majesty; to inhabit it, with any hope of definition as poet, you begin by finding names for its manifestations. This is what Robert Hass is doing in Field Guide, finding names; if he succeeds as abundantly as he promises in his first bookful of poems, he will soon be a "name," himself, in the growing company of American naturists. Readers of The Hudson Review may better remember him from "Book Buying in the Tenderloin," an acrimonious, headlong poem of another sort. In the context of this admirable collection it has more recognizably the sound of another poet, perhaps Robert Lowell. Hass can be vehement, with political edge, in his own way (cf. "Assassin" and "The Failure of Buffalo to Levitate"); on balance, however, the landscape pieces are those that strike roots. Here is his domain: "… calligraphies of pheasant tracks / in the last crisp snow around the soggy fields. / Some buds, magenta-colored, green-veined, / sap rising…." He is not yet out of the woods; literally he's safest when in them. Flower-power and injustice-hunting have left their marks. He professes wonder ("Lament for the Poles of Buffalo") that there is no monument to a drunken Seneca who stabbed two defenseless whittlers (in 1802) and was hanged. Under frontier conditions, what could have been a likelier outcome?

In "The Return of Robinson Jeffers" he wants to reclaim Jeffers for "An awkward brotherhood with the world's numb poor" and make his ghost see "finally, / that though rock stands, it does not breed." These are sentimental condescensions that refute the whole nature of Jeffers' poetry. At the storm center of his work stands the modern heresy he hunted down and for which he shaped his powerful and recurrent incest-symbol: the dependence of contemporary man on social (i.e. sexual) reflections of himself, "the woman, the serpent: the man, the rose-red cavern," and the narcissism of "falling in love inward" … "he had given himself to stone gods," says Hass. No. Let's not confuse metaphor with man. If Hass has read Jeffers' letters, he must see that the man was sympathetically involved that he had an informed political intelligence, that it was he who said of another, "I think even poets should read the newspapers," that he busily served on prize-giving juries and addressed himself with conscience to the hard choice of rewarding talent or meeting financial need. And let's be real: he married and had two sons; today, one is a National Park ranger, the other a CPA—"rock … does not breed." Mr. Hass said that. Since Jeffers casts the longest shadow over his shoulder, Hass is no doubt performing a ritual-murder of the father. That's to be expected. I simply feel that Jeffers' ghost should not be burdened with even more misunderstanding than its owner took to the grave. (Since no one in America has written poetry more sensual, I'm surprised Jeffers isn't now fashionable!) Hass needs no self-aggrandizement. His purest poetry here (not perhaps his richest but his purest) is in the "Pornographer" quartet. As I read it, the motive is not far from that of Jeffers' "Love the Wild Swan": the fragility of art (pornography, for the instance) when tested against the reverberations of history or "the two-note whistles from a cardinal." In these formally perfect verses, beginnings and endings harmonize, revealing themes at a glance, like a sheet of music. Here are two examples.