Hass aims to help readers deeply fathom poetry through considering how a poem’s formal structure, and its interaction with poetic history, enable the poem to embody “the energy of the gesture of its making.” This is the subjective pursuit of a practitioner rather than that of a scholar. It’s also, at more than 400 pages, not a little book. Hass gives innumerable answers to the questions that obsess poets and readers of poetry: What is poetry, and why does it do what it does?
Hass aims to help readers deeply fathom poetry through considering how a poem’s formal structure, and its interaction with poetic history, enable the poem to embody “the energy of the gesture of its making.” This is the subjective pursuit of a practitioner rather than that of a scholar. It’s also, at more than 400 pages, not a little book. Hass gives innumerable answers to the questions that obsess poets and readers of poetry: What is poetry, and why does it do what it does?
How my heart sings 