Robert Hass and The Common Reader

Robert Hass’s forthcoming A Third Commonness is a book to move around in. This is not to say it should not also be read all the way through. Gathering more than 20 reviews, essays, and introductions from the late 1980s to the present, it functions as both a companion volume to the former United States poet laureate’s seven volumes of verse and a heady, heartfelt collage that centers Hass as reader—which, of course, is how every writer must begin. As he explains in an author’s note that he characterizes as “an introduction to a book full of introductions,” “I got much of my education from reading essays and book reviews and the kinds of introductions to books that are most specifically aimed at hungry young readers. I was a hungry young reader, so this collection…might be said to be the work of that figure on the shore in Philip Dow’s poem, shoveling salt into the waves to pay back the sea.”

Oh, how I love that image, even though, until I encountered it, I had never heard of Dow. Now I want to linger with it for a moment because it seems to me essential, to encapsulate precisely what the act of literature seeks to do. I use the word act because literature is active, whether one is writing or reading. It is a back-and-forth, a conversation, taking place within each of us individually, or privately, as much as it is shared. Hass understands this; we might call such a posture fundamental to these essays, which are, by turns, offhand, conversational, and deeply engaged. Dow represents a case in point; he is mentioned only once, in passing, in the body of A Third Commonness, and the poem in question, “Paying Back the Sea,” goes in these pages entirely unremarked.

And yet, that figure on the shore: He is every one of us, isn’t he? He is every hungry reader who has ever undertaken to feel their way toward becoming a writer, standing at the edge of an uncharted ocean in which he is, in which we all are, already in the process—how could it be otherwise?—of becoming immersed.

Something similar might be said as well of Hass, who in A Third Commonness writes out of a double (or even triple) vision: the young aspirant; the older, established writer; and every stage of development or evolution in between. This is because he understands, as something of an article of faith, that reading and writing are two sides of a single coin. One cannot exist, or be imagined, without the other. As Hass observes of Galway Kinnell, in an afterword to the poet’s novel, Black Light, “One of his classmates was W.S. Merwin…and Kinnell…remembers one night when an excited Merwin first showed him the poems of William Butler Yeats, stayed all night, in fact, and read poems to him into the dawn.”

I remember, from my own undergraduate experience, just this sort of excitation, the feeling that I was being initiated into something, reading as a kind of rite. I remember the sense of expansion bestowed by every writer who got inside my skin, every discovery about language and emotion, the give and take between them, the delicious tensions they provoked. For me, as a young reader, the key was not knowing. Literature might have been an ocean—or better, a continent, which is my metaphor of choice—but I had yet to chart it. This has been the work of my reading life.

For Hass, too, discovery sits at the center of the project. He is reading to be stirred. The idea is not only to chart the territory but also to inhabit it, to carve out a place for himself, to work through what he’s reading as it unfolds. His willingness to marvel, to ponder aloud, and to acknowledge what he doesn’t know is among the greatest joys of A Third Commonness, which is marked more by openness, by questions, than by certainties. Consider his 2025 encomium for Newton Arvin—the pioneering critic, biographer, and longtime Smith College professor who mentored Truman Capote. “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Hass confesses, “until I started reading about Arvin, that the idea of the literary critic, and of the literature professor in the university…were inventions of the early twentieth century.”

Or the long essay on the two-volume American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander for Library of America in 1993. Here, Hass cites “literally dozens of poets whom you have never heard of (and whom I, having a few years ago been drafted to teach courses in the history of American poetry, and having tackled the task with some diligence, had mostly not heard of and had certainly not read).” The admission is stunning, made more so by the decision to take up a full page listing them. “Readers should score themselves,” he suggests. “Two points for every name you recognize, 25 if you can quote a line or call up the title of a poem.”

What this offers is a model, one that starts with the permission not to know. It’s a capacious gesture, generous and open, and it makes Hass’s writing accessible and approachable, no matter where in our reading lives we may reside. Reading, after all, is a way of living; that’s what Hass wants us to know. Criticism, then, can only function as a heightened form of reading: reading with a pen in hand. The point is that we reckon with literature most deeply when we are writing, or imagining, our way around it. This is the enterprise in which A Third Commonness is involved.

In that sense, it’s hardly surprising that Hass should begin and end the book by exploring two sets of definitions, the first involving nature (created for Barry Lopez’s 2006 field guide of sorts, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape) and the second, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Both are signature subjects for Hass, marking a zone in which word and world can’t help but coincide. “One defines an object, first of all,” he writes, “by saying what category of thing it belongs to, and then by specifying what distinguishes it from other objects in that category.” Is it too much to say the same is true of writing, true of reading? It’s all a mapping of the territory, a charting of the sea.•

Join us on April 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hass will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Jesse Nathan to discuss Praise. Register for the Zoom conversation here.