SOURCE: "One Body: Some Notes on Form, 1978," in Claims for Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1982, pp. 151-64.

In the following essay, Hass traces the development of poetic forms from the human hunger for repetition, for mother, and for myth, to its present use as an expression of the poet's personality.

I've been trying to think about form in poetry and my mind keeps returning to a time in the country in New York when I was puzzled that my son Leif was getting up a little earlier every morning. I had to get up with him, so it exasperated me. I wondered about it until I slept in his bed one night. His window faced east. At six-thirty I woke to brilliant sunlight. The sun had risen.

Wonder and repetition. Another morning I was walking Kristin to her bus stop—a light blanket of snow after thaw, the...