SOURCE: "Reading Old Friends," in Southern Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 391-406.

[In the following excerpt, Matthias, who is a personal acquaintance of Hass's, presents a thorough analysis of Twentieth Century Pleasures.]

Robert Hass begins one of the pieces in 20th Century Pleasures by saying that he has been "worrying the bone of this essay for days" because he wants to say some things against the poems he has agreed to discuss in a special issue of a journal celebrating the work of James Wright. I have been worrying the bone of this essay for days as well, but not because I want to say anything against the work I intend to discuss. I have decided to write in an autobiographical way [in this issue of the Southern Review and in the next] about three books … which are themselves autobiographical in different respects and which are, as it...