SOURCE: "Approaching the Fin de Siècle," in The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 200-18.

In the following excerpt, Davidson evaluates Hass's use of the scenic mode in his poetry, commenting on his skill in evoking the natural landscape and describing its allegorical relationship to a cognitive act.

The most obvious change that has occurred in the past twenty years (the perennial Beat revival notwithstanding) has been a growing skepticism about the more expressive or visionary claims of neoromantics like Duncan, McClure, and Ginsberg. The elegiac rhetoric of the 1940s and the bardic chant of the late 1950s have given way to a considerably cooler tone and chastened rhetoric. At times, as in the case of "language writing," this skepticism has been embodied in formal procedures (the use of Fibonacci number series, collaboration, the "new sentence," etc.) that limit the role...