In this California Book Club clip, Robert Hass recalls encountering Conrad Aiken’s A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry as a child and being ensnared by the word “comprehensive.” Feeling that the word was significant, despite not understanding it completely, he brought the book home. Hass discovered the Wallace Stevens poem “Domination of Black” and became consumed by Stevens’s poetic world of darkness and descriptions of sorrowful cries of a peacock. It was the first time, he recalled, that he heard someone telling the truth.•
