Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times—a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some “propelling force.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times—a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some “propelling force.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.

In Third Commonness, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography, from Zen Buddhist poetry to California Ecopoetry, from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through various essays and lectures, Third Commonness is as much a book of literary criticism as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves these histories together with the boundless hand of a writer inseparable from modern American literature. "Here it is, this stretch of it," he says. Sometimes there is a requiem, other times—a romance or a political reckoning. Always we return to poetry, which encounters itself over and over again, beckoned into being by some “propelling force.”