This is, by my count, my third gathering of essays and reviews. And I noticed that, inside the genre of the essay, it includes a number of introductions—an introduction to an anthology of the history of the translation of Greek poetry from Homer in the eighth century BCE to young poets in the Athens avant-garde; an introduction to a contemporary Chinese poet, one of an emerging generation I thought American readers should get to know; an introduction to translations of a classic poet of the Tang dynasty, a specialist in garden poems; an introduction to a collection of the letters exchanged between two twentieth-century poet-priests working out their relation to spirituality and social justice; an introduction to a classic book of American environmental writing by Gary Snyder on the occasion of its republication; a rather long introduction to an anthology of the history of American environmental poetry; an introduction to one of many translations of the early twentieth century German poet Rainier Maria Rilke, a translation that attempts to replicate his rhythms and rhyme schemes; an afterword to an anthology of early modernist American women poets, especially their experimental poems about marriage; and an introduction to the reprint of a small novel, fable really, in the manner of Albert Camus, by the then-young American poet Galway Kinnell, about religious fanaticism and sexuality (based on his experience of living in Iran as a Fulbright fellow in the 1950s).
You get the idea. People close to me have been known to sing to me a version of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric from Oklahoma! about the girl who can’t say no, which is perhaps why, assembling this collection, I feel an obscure need to explain myself. The short version is that 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, like the previous collections, 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.
The longer version, I have found myself thinking, begins with Herodotus. The summer before I started college—I had elected to go to Saint Mary’s because it was the school in Northern California that required four years of Great Books seminars, and that felt to me like getting an education—I had a note from the college recommending that incoming freshmen prepare for the seminar by reading the Iliad and Herodotus’s The Histories. I can see now that this assignment must have been devised by a committee of young humanities faculty with the idea of opening the year by sharpening (or maybe blurring) the distinction between history and myth. But I had never heard of Herodotus’s The Histories and so had a sense that the great adventure was beginning, and made my way to a bookstore and acquired a copy. I hadn’t already read the Iliad, but I knew what was in it. At least I have a memory of producing in eighth grade a crayon drawing of Achilles with an arrow in his heel outside the walls of Troy, so I must have read a Classics Illustrated comic book of Homer. I was, anyway, completely bewildered by The Histories. It sounded like someone’s chatty old uncle retelling the neighborhood gossip version of the story of the Trojan War. And my reaction was to wonder about college. This, I was thinking, is somebody’s idea of a Great Book? And I spent the rest of the summer reading Russian novels—and the novels of John Steinbeck, who was a Northern California writer.
But when I found my way to Saint Mary’s, I also found my way to a library with a reading room in which were displayed the literary and cultural weeklies and quarterlies of the late 1950s: Partisan Review and The Hudson Review and The Kenyon Review; for their arts and culture sections, The New Republic and The Nation. There were essays on subjects that I had no idea serious people thought about—how to think about cowboy movies or silent comedy—and things that I was less surprised serious people thought about, though I hadn’t met anybody who talked about them—how to listen to Miles Davis, what abstract expressionism was—and there were reviews of novels and plays and books of poems, and—it was a Roman Catholic college—there were journals such as Commonweal and America that printed articles on the antinuclear movement and civil rights, theology, existentialism. Also Commentary, the Jewish magazine, though I was only dimly aware that it was Jewish. My great discovery in those years was the essays of James Baldwin, and another was Albert Camus, whom Baldwin led me to. I was absorbing the fact that the essay could do many things, could be both a fugitive and an urgent literary form, though I don’t think I thought about it that way. What I thought at the time was that the essay was one of the places I had imagined college to be, where the grand conversation was actually happening. I was seventeen years old.
Another discovery in those years was the basement of City Lights Bookstore. Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights in 1953. It had the distinction of being the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, maybe in the world. The store sat at a corner where the Chinese and Italian neighborhoods of the city converged and crossed Broadway, the street of cafés, bars, and jazz and comedy clubs. I had a job summers in the Financial District and made my way on my lunch hour to City Lights. The magazines and the poetry shelves were in the basement where there were tables at which to sit and read. I think it was in an introduction, perhaps by George Steiner, that I read that the three brothers Karamazov represented three human types: the sensual man, the intellectual man, and the spiritual man—which proposed to me a new way of reading novels and gave me to wonder which kind of man I was or wanted to be.
Less than 1 percent of Americans had any higher education in 1900, when Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and, a little later, T.S. Eliot went to Harvard. In 1960, 7 percent of the population had college degrees. (In 2025 it’s 28 percent.) The difference between 1900 and 1960 is approximately 300,000 people, and those 300,000 needed to buy books. This meant that there was suddenly a considerable demand for books on the backlists of American publishers, books they did not have to pay to acquire, and publishers began to produce inexpensive editions—the term was quality paperbacks—much more handsome than the pocket-sized mysteries and romances that sold on drugstore racks. And to tone up these volumes they asked writers and scholars of various kinds to provide new introductions. Which is why, though I didn’t realize it, I was wandering on my lunch hour through the early years of the heyday of the introduction and the preface.
The magazines and journals in the basement of the bookstore were much more eclectic than the ones in the college library. One of them, in the taut decades of the Cold War when a coffee shop up the street was called the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, was a brand-new magazine called Journal for the Protection of All Beings. (I did not know then that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the editors, had, as a young naval officer in Japan, visited the charred ruins of Nagasaki.) For me, at that age, a table of contents was also a reading list, and I took in the names in capital letters of some of the contributors: BERTRAND RUSSELL ANTONIN ARTAUD ALBERT CAMUS THOMAS MERTON ALLEN GINSBERG NORMAN MAILER WILLIAM BURROUGHS. Another name was Gary Snyder, who had contributed an essay entitled “Buddhist Anarchism.” I don’t know how the very young take in the world of information and ideas and the arts on the internet today, when bookstores are dwindling and the reasons for visiting libraries are less compelling, but I do wonder how they focus, thinking of myself in those years, standing in the basement of City Lights on my lunch hour and musing on the fact that I had no idea what anarchism was—it evidently didn’t just mean chaos—and only a very vague concept of Buddhism. (I did take in, because I was reading James Baldwin, the fact that these contributors were all white, and, collaterally, almost only male.)
Next to the magazines and near the tables and chairs for browsers were the poetry shelves. Poetry had, already, some excitement for me, and I had found in the college library what seemed the report on the state of that art, an anthology entitled Fifteen Modern American Poets, edited by the novelist and short-story writer George P. Elliott. This would have been a few years before the anthology of postwar poetry titled The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen, appeared. It represented the generation who had mostly come of age just before the war, raised during the Depression that had, among other things, put to rest the exuberant experiments of modernism. Not that I would have been aware of that at the time. Then, the table of contents was another reading list: Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Josephine Miles, Richard Wilbur.
Turning the pages, I was reading in those years for poems rather than poets, but I was also absorbing that generation’s idea of what poetry was. I suppose I already had a notion. My older brother had been an English major and would sometimes read aloud to me from Wordsworth and Tennyson, that idea of poetry. And in high school English we took in Robert Frost using the language of everyday speech with a New England twang and applying the techniques of realism to a pastoral tradition and a wisdom poetry. And I had been haunted by the music of a poem by Wallace Stevens, some of which I could recite, though I probably couldn’t have told you the author’s name. The last poem in our senior high school literature text was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Our teacher admitted that he couldn’t make any sense of it, which prejudiced us in its favor, and since from this distance it is evident that the poem is about sexuality and crippling self-consciousness, it is no wonder that adolescent boys understood it.
So I suppose I already had the idea that poetry was the language for what you didn’t have a language for, and also that it was attractive language, so that, when John Keats said that beauty is truth, truth beauty, we knew, more or less, what he meant. This way of experiencing it helped to explain to me the criticism of poetry in the magazines, that it was in the nature of poetry to elicit the desire to talk about what couldn’t quite be talked about. The poets who attracted me in Fifteen Modern American Poets were Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Lowell for the apocalyptic music of the wartime Atlantic Ocean:
And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
And Roethke for the music of a haunted inwardness in nature poetry:
At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding in wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues
The new postwar explosion of poetry showed up when the San Francisco district attorney prosecuted Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Howl was one in a series of small books published by City Lights, and that gave me another list of names, including Ferlinghetti, and his A Coney Island of the Mind. There was also Denise Levertov’s Here and Now, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Kenneth Patchen’s Poems of Humor & Protest, Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems. If I’d had to describe the different impulses of what seemed the two kinds of poetry, I think I would have said that the one represented depth and craft—and was associated in my mind with the East Coast where most of the magazines and books came from—and the other with freshness and spontaneity, which I associated with the West Coast. I had also begun to read the poets of Northern California, Robinson Jeffers in Carmel and Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco, who seemed to have some of the qualities of both coasts. It was in these years that I began to imagine writing poetry and, somewhere in those days, I suppose, was the impulse that finds me writing today an introduction to a book full of introductions.
John Updike entitled one of his books of occasional prose Odd Jobs. In that spirit I thought about calling this collection Yard Work, which seemed appropriately diffident and didn’t necessarily require me to spell out what the yard was. But during the last decade or so I made my living teaching courses in American poetry and environmental studies to the students at Berkeley, which made me feel that I should reach for something a little more grand, in the ways that American poetry is grand and North American ecological writing urgent. So the present title came to mind. It comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The River of Rivers in Connecticut.” A few lines of it are an epigraph to this book. Here is how it begins:
There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.
In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun.
Readers will find in this book a talk I gave at the Library of Congress on the poets of the Connecticut River watershed. Stevens had the actual river in mind, but his mind leapt to the metaphorical one and so did mine. The occasional prose of an era, the essays and reviews where a culture sorts out the values implicit in its art, literature, and philosophical writing aren’t exactly the river. The art and literature, music, movies, theater, essays in ideas, theological writing, all the work of mind and imagination that leaves its mark as it flows by (or as we flow by it), is the river. The forms of occasional prose are perhaps the murmur of the current as they take in and transform the river’s energy. They help to make of the unnamed flowing a vigor and a curriculum.
“Author’s Note” from A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World, copyright 2026 by Robert Hass, used with permission of Copper Canyon Press.