Meditation at Lagunitas Themes

This poem is a big game of linguistic dodge ball between poets and philosophers. The philosophers say that words are ideas which represent a perfect or original example of a thing. The poets say th...

This poem falls under the genre of the "pastoral," which means that it celebrates natural beauty. But, the speaker doesn’t just celebrate; he also uses the natural world as evidence against p...

Plato’s name is never mentioned in the poem, but his fingerprints are everywhere. For example, Plato gives the first really self-conscious example of what might be the most common metaphor of...

The poem argues that desire, both of the sexual and non-sexual varieties, has its roots in memory. We desire things which remind us of other things that we have lost, but want to recover. We are "t...

Hass is not a poet who thinks that sex is shocking or abnormal. He thinks it is a normal experience to discuss and puzzle over. So normal, in fact, that he doesn’t distinguish between sexual...