Buddhist (Post) Modernism in Robert Hass’s Early Poetry and Poetics: “The Fullness of Desire”
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 1.1 Aims of the Inquiry
- 1.2 Scope of Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Approach towards an Eclectic Poetics
- 1.3 Structure of the Inquiry
- 2 Review of Research: Towards a Comprehensive Study of Hass’s Oeuvre
- 2.1 The Critical Reception of Field Guide upon Publication
- 2.2 Hass Criticism and Hass’s Criticism
- 2.3 The Reception of Praise and the “Touchstones” of Hass’s Oeuvre
- 2.4 Human Wishes, Canonization, Criticism, and the Heyday of Hass Criticism
- 2.5 Sun Under Wood and the “Confessionalist Turn”
- 2.6 Assessing Hass’s Work of Three Decades
- 2.7 Hass Studies in the Twenty-First Century
- 2.8 Hass’s Status in American Poetry Studies
- 2.8.1 Composite Poetics vs. Resistance to Closure
- 2.8.2 Sentimental Self-Satisfaction vs. Wisdom and Ethics
- 2.8.3 Arrière Garde and Middle-Class Poetics
- 2.9 Acclaim for Summer Snow
- 2.10 Toward an Assessment of a Career in Poetry
- 3 Hass’s Buddhist Modernist Vision of Nature and Self
- 3.1 Basic Coordinates of Hass’s Buddhist Modernist Aesthetics
- 3.1.1 Annata and Interbeing: Basic Coordinates of Hass’s Buddhist Modernism
- 3.1.2 Buddhist Modernist Poetic Conceptions of (Non-)Self and Interdependence
- 3.1.3 Buddhist Modernism in “A Pencil” and Selected Criticism
- 3.2 Hass’s Buddhist Modernist Reception of the Haiku
- 3.2.1 Key Interests in the Form
- 3.2.2 Beyond Logopoeia: Hass and the Modernist Reception of the Haiku
- 3.2.3 Beyond Logopoeia – Whereto? Scope and Limits of Hass’s Vision of Haiku Aesthetics
- 3.3 Experiments with Bashōian Aesthetics and Buddhist-Romantic Encounters in Field Guide
- 3.3.1 Bashōian Aesthetics in Selected Poems of Field Guide
- 3.3.2 But “Isn’t It Romantic?” Buddhism, Romanticism, and the Influence of D. T. Suzuki
- 3.3.3 “Sunrise” with Blyth and Suzuki
- 3.3.4 Buddhist-Romantic Union with Nature in “San Pedro Road”
- 3.3.5 The Meditative-Dramatic Mode: Hybrid Poetics in “Measure”
- 3.3.6 Preliminary Conclusions and Approximations of Hass’s Buddhist-Romantic Poetics
- 4 Toward a Buddhist Postmodernism
- 4.1 The Scope and Limits of a Buddhist Modernist Poetics in Snyder and Hass
- 4.1.1 Gary Snyder’s Buddhist Modernist Poetics of Nondualism
- 4.1.2 Buddhist Modernist Acts of Seizure and the Crises of Modernity
- 4.1.3 Buddhist Modernism and the Limits of Language
- 4.2 Positive Orientalism, Buddhist Modernism, and the Confines of Language
- 4.2.1 Lacanian Reflections of Language and Self in “Applications of the Doctrine”
- 4.2.2 The Dynamics of Lacanian Signification in “Weed” and the “Spring Drawing” Sequence
- 4.2.3 “Child Naming Flowers” and the Lacanian Mirror Stage
- 4.2.4 Pound, Heidegger, Positive Orientalism, and Adamic Naming – Hass’s “Brutal Confidence in [Language’s] Ability to Possess the World”
- 4.3 Connecting the Dots – Reading Hass with Lacan and the Buddha
- 4.3.1 “Ontic Noncommitment” and a Buddhist-Lacanian Appreciation of Language in “Picking Blackberries with a Friend who has been Reading Jacques Lacan”
- 4.3.2 Buddhist-Lacanian Appreciations of Language in “Meditation at Lagunitas”
- 4.3.3 Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Hass’s Continued Reflection of the Buddhist-Lacanian Void
- 5 Conclusion
- Appendix: Robert Hass Interviewed by Lutz Stichl, June 8, 2017 in Berkeley, California
- Works Cited
Lutz Stichl
Buddhist (Post) Modernism in Robert Hass’s Early Poetry and Poetics: “The Fullness of Desire”
Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - New York - Oxford
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-3-631-92793-9 (Print)
E‐ISBN 978-3-631-92794-6 (E-PDF)
E‐ISBN 978-3-631-92795-3 (E-PUB)
10.3726/b22484
© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin, Germany
info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
About the author
Lutz Stichl, currently vice principal of St. Michael-Gymnasium Bad Münstereifel, studied History and English at RWTH Aachen University. He worked at RWTH Aachen University, Department of English, American, and Romance Studies, at Städtisches Gymnasium Rheinbach, and as a consultant to the Köln District Government. His PhD thesis has been awarded the Borchers’ Plaque 2025.
About the book
This book is the first sustained scholarly effort to analyze reflections of Far Eastern, especially Buddhist-inspired, aesthetics, culture, and philosophy in the poetry and criticism of Robert Hass. Three main concerns of his work can be examined through Hass’s reception of Buddhist ideas. Firstly, poetic-ontological perspectives on the self and desire, influenced by the concepts of anatta (non-self ) and tanha (craving). Secondly, appreciations of the sublime in the near-at-hand, i.e., a Buddhist understanding of interdependence. Lastly, Hass’s negative capability in the face of philosophical discussions concerning the limits of language.
These concerns manifest themselves in an idealistic understanding of the haiku and in a Buddhist-Romantic effort to foster a more intimate relationship with nature. Additionally, they become evident in an ecopoetic desire to combat the abstractions and aberrations of modernity through Far Eastern aesthetics, as well as in a Buddhistderived understanding of paradox as a means of transcendence.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
To my parents, my wife, and my son.
1 Introduction
1.1 Aims of the Inquiry
The poetry and poetics of Robert Hass are among the most thoroughly discussed of any poet of his generation. Nevertheless, a key characteristic of his oeuvre has so far mostly been hinted at or taken for granted by critics: the influence of Far Eastern aesthetics and spirituality, most notably Zen Buddhism.
The prior objective of the study at hand is a first sustained scholarly effort to systematically identify and analyze the influence of an idiosyncratic reflection of Far Eastern, especially Buddhist-inspired aesthetics, culture, and philosophy on Hass’s poetry and criticism. The focus will be on contextualizations and close readings of poems and literary essays working out the motivations and origins of Hass’s Orientalism and examining the strategies of his idiosyncratic appropriations of Far Eastern aesthetics and ideas. Furthermore, I will integrate these readings into established approaches towards Hass’s poetry and poetics investigating the interaction of his Orientalism with thoroughly studied aspects of his oeuvre such as his reception of Modernist aesthetics, the significance of ecopoetry, Romantic sensibilities, or reflections of poststructuralist theory. Broadly speaking, three main concerns of his work can be accounted for by analyzing Hass’s reception of Buddhist ideas: firstly, his poetic-ontological perspectives on the nature of the self and desire; secondly, the poet’s appreciation of the sublime in the near-at-hand, i.e., a Buddhist understanding of interdependence; and, thirdly, Hass’s negative capability or “ontic noncommitment” in the face of philosophical and literary-theoretical discussions concerning the limits of language. These concerns manifest themselves in various characteristic stances, techniques, or approaches of Hass’s early and some of his mid-career poetry and criticism, most notably: in an idealistic understanding of the haiku in which the image figures as a rhetorical device but also a mode of apprehension; in what may be termed a Buddhist-Romantic endeavor to contrive a more intimate relationship with nature; in an ecopoetic desire to combat the abstractions and aberrations of modernity by means of an idealized Far Eastern aesthetic; and in a Buddhist-derived understanding of the paradox as a means of transcendence.
1.2 Scope of Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Approach towards an Eclectic Poetics
Although the focus will be on a selection of texts by Hass and other writers with a US American literary background, I will have to go beyond formalist, biographical, and comparatist readings in an interdisciplinary approach that also incorporates contemporary critical theory, and, with all due circumspection, findings of Buddhist studies.* It is necessary to account for the poet’s direct and indirect Far Eastern, Buddhist, Buddhist modernist, or Orientalist sources and to be mindful of problems of definition, reception, or appropriation that go widely beyond the paradigms of Hass scholarship undertaken so far. Although the relevance of Buddhist ideas and aesthetics for the poet’s oeuvre is acknowledged, their manifestations are mostly addressed in tentative if not opaque terms.1 Altieri, for instance, vaguely describes Hass’s “ability to recognize the interdependence of several modes of life” as “a sensibility informed by, but not entirely shaped by Buddhism” (“Avant Garde” 635). Cutler speculates on the influence of “alternative religions,” “Asian influences, and experimentalism” (120). Rathmann’s characterization of Hass as a “sage” or “wisdom-poet,” whose interest in Buddhism is “‘spiritualʼ (rather than intellectual)” may even suggest that the poet’s idiosyncratic approach defies systematic in-depth studies (“Essential Haiku” 109).
A first problem is one of definition as characterizing Hass’s recognition of interdependence or his reflection of self as “Buddhist” is as meaningless as calling them “Christian,” “Muslim,” or “Hindu.” Hass himself has done little to allow for an understanding of the nature of the Buddhist sensibilities underlying his work as he describes himself as a “fellow traveler rather than a conscientious practicer of Buddhism” (“Poetry East” 51:10).2 He never formalized his Buddhist practice according to the tenets of a particular tradition or took vows with a teacher. Instead, the poet points out that his initial interest in Buddhism was less informed by canonical texts or scripture than by popular Buddhist texts – D. T. Suzuki in particular – which opened up, as he puts it casually, “ways of cultivating consciousness that gave [him] some of the things [his] experience of [Catholic] religion had given [him]” before (Hass interviewed by Stichl 295).3 It is thus apparent that the autodidactic and idiosyncratic nature of Hass’s Buddhism is much more elusive than that of his older contemporaries Gary Snyder or Philip Whalen, whose formal Zen studies are well documented, or even Allen Ginsberg, who studied under Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and later Gehlenk Rinpoche mostly on the basis of Tibetan Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions.4 Although the fuzziness of Hass’s Buddhist inclinations commends circumspection, focus, and succinct methodology, this inquiry will thus have to embark from a broad understanding of Hass’s Buddhist sensibilities in the sense of McMahan who subsumes “forms of Buddhism that have emerged out of an engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of modernity” under the umbrella term “Buddhist modernism” (Buddhist Modernism 6).5 It comprises “a hybrid of a number of Buddhist traditions that have cross-fertilized with the dominant discourses of Western modernity, especially those rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism and Protestant Christianity” (ibid. 3).
McMahan’s work is part of a growing number of theories of cultural appropriation and reception that both aid and complicate the study of such transfers and cross-fertilizations in an author like Hass.6 As is the case with most “fellow travelers” of Buddhism in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Hass’s initial encounter with Buddhist philosophy is mediated by D. T. Suzuki, the central figure in the emergence of Buddhist modernism, whose idiosyncratic and highly selective Zen teachings meshed up Buddhist ideas with German Idealism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, or psychoanalysis to make them more relatable for Western audiences.7 In a similar fashion, Hass encountered haiku poetics, the foremost Buddhist-literary influence on his work, through the translations and editions of R. H. Blyth, another Buddhist modernist, who famously asserted “Zen” affinities in Wordsworth, Goethe, Coleridge, or Emerson, believing that “all that is good in European literature and culture is simply and solely that which is in accordance with the spirit of Zen” (English Literature and Oriental Classics). But the common ground of Buddhist philosophy and nineteenth century European aesthetics – a productive field of study in its own right – is not the only Buddhist modernist paradigm that offers a gateway to Hass’s idiosyncratic Orientalism. The typical “amalgamation of Zen with concepts of spontaneity and the unconscious from Romanticism and psychoanalysis” or its dialog with “post-Romantic themes of Modernism, existentialism, and other currents of twentieth century art and thought,” analyzed by McMahan, likewise allow for an integration of Hass’s Buddhist sensibilities with aspects of his work that have been and continue to be explored in Hass scholarship, most notably the influence of Pound’s Modernism, the Buddhist-inspired poetry of Rexroth, Snyder, or Jeffers, but also (Lacanian) psychoanalysis (Buddhist Modernism 24, 146).
Details
- Pages
- 332
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631927946
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631927953
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631927939
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22484
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (December)
- Keywords
- 20th century American poetry Buddhism Buddhist Modernism Lacanian psychoanalysis Robert Hass
- Published
- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2024. 332 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
