Robert Hass(I)

Noted American poet. Among his books which have received awards are "Field Guide" (1972), "Praise" (1979), "Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry" (1984) and "Sun Under Wood" (1996). He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.

We have lived in a catastrophic time. The redundancy of violence and suffering, the sheer immensity of the danger, always threatens to wither the imagination. The effort to think about the fate of the planet, about what man is that he has done to himself all the terrible things that he has in this century, comes to us mostly as dark and private musings.