SOURCE: "The Discursive Muse: Robert Hass's 'Songs to Survive the Summer'," in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 61, No. 2, 1989, pp. 193-201.

In the following excerpt, Gustavsson explicates "Songs to Survive the Summer," while observing that the poem is Hass's most successful work using a new discourse that breaks with the aesthetics of modernist lyric poetry.

In the 1970s a group of American poets emerged who shared the common ambition to write a new discursive poetry. These poets, among others Robert Pinsky, Stanley Plumly, and Robert Hass, perhaps the best poet of the group, all reacted against the conventions of modernist lyric poetry and instead they wanted to recover for poetry the virtues of good, expository prose. Rejecting the esthetics of modernist lyric poetry they wanted to write a poetry of the mind that explored the discursive resources of statement and argumentation. The goal was to "have a mind of winter," in...