Hass, Robert (1941-…), is an American poet, translator, and literary critic. He has won recognition for the clear, concise style of his verse and his sensitivity to the natural world and to the pleasures and pains of life. Hass served as poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He used the position to aggressively promote interest in poetry and literacy. Hass won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (2007).
Hass was born on March 1, 1941, in San Francisco. He studied Slavic literature while attending St. Mary’s College of California and Stanford University. He received a B.A. from St. Mary’s in 1963 and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford in 1965 and 1971, respectively. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, St. Mary’s College, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Hass’s interest in Slavic literature and his California background influenced his highly praised first volume of poetry, Field Guide (1973). His other verse collections include Praise (1979), Human Wishes (1989), Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996), Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (2007), The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (2010), and Summer Snow (2020).
Hass has translated many works by the Polish-born poet Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature. Hass also edited The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), an anthology of haiku—short Japanese poems—written by three masters of the form. A collection of his essays and reviews about American, European, and Japanese poets was published as Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984).
