Robert Hass Books

Form in poetry has never been static; it has evolved as our sense of time, speech, and experience has evolved. If you trace the history of English and American verse, as I do in this book, you begin to see how the heartbeat of meter once mirrored the cadence of prayer and chant. In early English ver...

From A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

Rhythm, I’ve always believed, is the body’s first knowledge. Long before we understand words, we understand motion, pulse, the fall and lift of air. Meter is that embodied sense translated into time and measure. In the book, I explore how metrical patterns like iambic pentameter, with its da-DUM hea...

From A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry