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What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World – Luminous Literary Reflections on Photography and American Writers
Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world—with accompanying photos throughout.
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”
What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”
501 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 13, 2011
78 people are currently reading
1773 people want to read
About the author
Robert Hass
120 books224 followersRobert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
March 2, 2014
I wish I could while away more hours inside the mind of Robert Hass. His essays on art, literature, film, philosophy, photography, human beings, and the very earth we stand on, are uplifting, enlightening. As a poet, Hass's critical eye may be more attuned to beauty than the average reader, so following him as he reads, watches, or observes a particular piece of art is like being taught by a master. Best of all, the pieces he chooses to discuss are oftentimes created by artists who are not that well known - or at least not to me. I had to pause to read the poetry of Ko Un and Ernesto Cardenal so that I could understand the point of Hass's essay on each. The process was one of delightful discovery.
As for the artists I knew, I found something to learn at every turn. Edward Taylor, Wallace Stevens, Mary Austin, Chekhov, Kant, Ginsburg, Louise Gluck, Cormac McCarthy, and Robinson Jeffers, are but to name a few. Reading What Light Can Do forced me back to my book shelves (again and again) to savor anew words I'd already read once but needed to read again.
All of the material in this book is a celebration of artistry and the human spirit. Hass's sensibility, sensitivity, and wide range of knowledge is apparent on each page.
As for the artists I knew, I found something to learn at every turn. Edward Taylor, Wallace Stevens, Mary Austin, Chekhov, Kant, Ginsburg, Louise Gluck, Cormac McCarthy, and Robinson Jeffers, are but to name a few. Reading What Light Can Do forced me back to my book shelves (again and again) to savor anew words I'd already read once but needed to read again.
All of the material in this book is a celebration of artistry and the human spirit. Hass's sensibility, sensitivity, and wide range of knowledge is apparent on each page.
November 5, 2016
Robert Hass, professor and lecturer at Cal-Berkeley, is the kind of guy I could sit and listen to forever, if his essays are any indication. He puts the "well" in "-read" (by that I mean he's "deep").
As you would expect, many of these essays treat on poetry and poets-- Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Ernesto Cardenal, Robinson Jeffers, Ko Un, Czeslaw Milosz, Walt Whitman, etc. But just as many have to do with prose writers-- Cormac McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Anton Chekhov, to name a few.
Hass's is an erudite yet avuncular style. His literary acumen is highbrow, but he speaks the language of middlebrows. Thus, the likes of me are able to follow along. It's a "dip" type of book. It rides shotgun as you are reading a novel, say, and when you're in the mood to learn more about, for instance, Chinese or Korean poetry, or maybe California writers, or maybe literature and war or literature and rivers or maybe literature and spirituality/religion, you open What Light Can Do, dip in, and feel elucidated for your troubles.
Move over, MOOCS. Robert Hass's essays see your on-line courses and raise them to the warm comforts of a 476-page book that's like a companion you can trust and take your time listening to.
As you would expect, many of these essays treat on poetry and poets-- Wallace Stevens, Allen Ginsberg, Ernesto Cardenal, Robinson Jeffers, Ko Un, Czeslaw Milosz, Walt Whitman, etc. But just as many have to do with prose writers-- Cormac McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Austin, Jack London, and Anton Chekhov, to name a few.
Hass's is an erudite yet avuncular style. His literary acumen is highbrow, but he speaks the language of middlebrows. Thus, the likes of me are able to follow along. It's a "dip" type of book. It rides shotgun as you are reading a novel, say, and when you're in the mood to learn more about, for instance, Chinese or Korean poetry, or maybe California writers, or maybe literature and war or literature and rivers or maybe literature and spirituality/religion, you open What Light Can Do, dip in, and feel elucidated for your troubles.
Move over, MOOCS. Robert Hass's essays see your on-line courses and raise them to the warm comforts of a 476-page book that's like a companion you can trust and take your time listening to.
October 29, 2012
Robert Hass proves he can apply his mastery of the evocative image in a few words to the wide breadth of human experience. Hass has been one of the Poet Laureates of the United States, a prolific translator of haiku (the good ones), and a stellar poet in his own right (Field Guide was my first introduction to his work). Now he collects his finely crafted essays on everything from Howl to Kant’s “Essay on Perpetual Peace” (my personal favorite), from photography to the Epistles of John, from Cormac McCarthy to how to teach poetry. (“The truth is, I am much more interested in poems than in the nature of poetry in more or less the same way that someone might be more interested in eating than the theory of cuisine.”) You may not be interested in every essay in the book, but there will be one that will reverberate in your cranium a long time after reading it. Especially recommended for poets, theorists of religion, revolutionaries, artists, and anyone who possesses a soul and a brain simultaneously.
September 16, 2012
1000 times yes.
March 10, 2013
I've always loved the poetry of Robert Hass, (I have his Apple Trees at Olema) though I had never read any of his essays. Now, this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite books - on Kindle - and I'm buying a hard copy to read and re-read and underline and scribble in the margins - it's that kind of book. What he says, and the way he says it, makes it a must-read.
In a week when Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot prize for poetry I re-read an essay sub-titled 'Poor Monkeys and the White Business in the Trees'. It's a thoughtful discussion of autobiographical poetry about families. Hass points out that it was a new subject when Robert Lowell published 'Life Studies' in 1959. 'It is a fact,' Hass observes, 'that [you] can learn nothing about the aunts or the grandmothers of John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope... John Keats, Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning' from their poetry. He also feels that it may be a particularly American phenomenon. 'American poetry is full of aunts and grandmothers, but French poetry isn't, or Serbian poetry or Arabic or Brazilian or for that matter, English poetry'. Robert Hass takes us through some theories of Why this might be, which I found fascinating.
One of the essays is a deliberation on war - particularly the Iraq war. 'How did this happen?' Hass asks. 'And why are ordinary Americans not being driven crazy by it?' The answer he supplies is 'fear, anger and ignorance'. How could ordinary people be expected to know that 'bombing Saddam Hussein because of a terrorist act perpetrated by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Muslim terrorists would seem to the people in the Middle East an act of pure aggression against all Islamic cultures by a power that could not distinguish among them.' But government and the educated media should have been able to and Hass castigates them for their failure to do so, accusing them of 'morally culpable ignorance'. He states that 'The moral and intellectual failure of American journalists and of political and policy intellectuals was breathtaking'.
There are several 'major' essays in the book; one of them on 'Chekhov's Anger', which told me quite a lot I didn't know about the author's life as well as providing an illuminating analysis of the work. Chekhov apparently began his career writing for comic newspapers and magazines in 19th century Russia - the same kind of 'penny dreadfuls' that Herbert Allingham wrote for in Britain. Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf who had bought his freedom and become a bailiff - the classic case of poacher turning gamekeeper. Chekhov's father was a small shop-keeper who went bankrupt when he was only 16 and the family moved to Moscow. Chekhov began publishing stories, sketches and jokes to pay his way through a medical degree. Soon he was keeping the whole family.
Robert Hass is very good on these early mass-market stories which were the 'equivalent of newspaper cartoons'. it taught Chekhov a lot about writing - particularly economy. This is Chekhov writing to Gorky - 'cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you like. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out'.
Hass points out that these early commercial stories have the same structure as the later stories that Chekhov is famous for. 'They depend on a surprise ending, usually, though not always on dramatic reversal, and the surprise in in one way or another wounding . . . The gasp that the story evokes, the little cry of surprise and discovery, comes out not just because the ending surprises, but because it fits'. The stories are also witty and it is 'the terrible presence of wit' that takes the stories from pathos into tragedy. Chekhov knew what he was doing in his fiction and his drama. 'I finish every act as I do my stories; I keep the action calm and quiet till the end, then I punch the audience in the face.'
Chekhov's anger came from the violent treatment meted out by his father, which he couldn't forgive, as well as the social injustice he witnessed in a Russia building up to civil war. Anger, Hass observes, can be 'the wellspring of art'. It reminds me of Katherine Mansfield, who said that one of the 'kick offs' for her was a 'cry against corruption'. Anger motivated many of her stories, and Chekhov was one of her big influences. She too, wrote only short stories, never a novel.
There are other wonderful essays in this book - 'Howl at Fifty' takes another look at Ginsberg 50 years on and compares the style of it to passages from the Waste Land (I'd never made the connection with Eliot before, but it's so obvious I now feel stupid!). He describes Howl as 'a kind of exploded, hallucinatory autobiography'. He talks about the genesis of Moloch and observes that 'Moloch has still got hold of a good chunk of the American soul'.
I also loved 'Imagining the Earth' - his essays on eco-poetry and literature, and one on 'Teaching Poetry' which I can't even begin to precis. It touches on the oral nature of poetry on the page - poetry is 'a kind of speech that's meant to be said by others'. In other essays he explores the connections between poetry and the natural world. He is pessimistic about our generation's custodianship of the planet. 'What a depleted world our students are inheriting'. Will they be able to save it? 'The task may be beyond us.' But 'We have to act as if we can accomplish it, as if we can preserve that richness and diversity. We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.'
I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves literature - it's a great companion volume to Robert Hass's collected poems too. Thoughtful, profound, outspoken - the writings of a compassionate individual who is also a great poet.
In a week when Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot prize for poetry I re-read an essay sub-titled 'Poor Monkeys and the White Business in the Trees'. It's a thoughtful discussion of autobiographical poetry about families. Hass points out that it was a new subject when Robert Lowell published 'Life Studies' in 1959. 'It is a fact,' Hass observes, 'that [you] can learn nothing about the aunts or the grandmothers of John Donne, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope... John Keats, Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning' from their poetry. He also feels that it may be a particularly American phenomenon. 'American poetry is full of aunts and grandmothers, but French poetry isn't, or Serbian poetry or Arabic or Brazilian or for that matter, English poetry'. Robert Hass takes us through some theories of Why this might be, which I found fascinating.
One of the essays is a deliberation on war - particularly the Iraq war. 'How did this happen?' Hass asks. 'And why are ordinary Americans not being driven crazy by it?' The answer he supplies is 'fear, anger and ignorance'. How could ordinary people be expected to know that 'bombing Saddam Hussein because of a terrorist act perpetrated by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Muslim terrorists would seem to the people in the Middle East an act of pure aggression against all Islamic cultures by a power that could not distinguish among them.' But government and the educated media should have been able to and Hass castigates them for their failure to do so, accusing them of 'morally culpable ignorance'. He states that 'The moral and intellectual failure of American journalists and of political and policy intellectuals was breathtaking'.
There are several 'major' essays in the book; one of them on 'Chekhov's Anger', which told me quite a lot I didn't know about the author's life as well as providing an illuminating analysis of the work. Chekhov apparently began his career writing for comic newspapers and magazines in 19th century Russia - the same kind of 'penny dreadfuls' that Herbert Allingham wrote for in Britain. Chekhov's grandfather had been a serf who had bought his freedom and become a bailiff - the classic case of poacher turning gamekeeper. Chekhov's father was a small shop-keeper who went bankrupt when he was only 16 and the family moved to Moscow. Chekhov began publishing stories, sketches and jokes to pay his way through a medical degree. Soon he was keeping the whole family.
Robert Hass is very good on these early mass-market stories which were the 'equivalent of newspaper cartoons'. it taught Chekhov a lot about writing - particularly economy. This is Chekhov writing to Gorky - 'cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you like. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out'.
Hass points out that these early commercial stories have the same structure as the later stories that Chekhov is famous for. 'They depend on a surprise ending, usually, though not always on dramatic reversal, and the surprise in in one way or another wounding . . . The gasp that the story evokes, the little cry of surprise and discovery, comes out not just because the ending surprises, but because it fits'. The stories are also witty and it is 'the terrible presence of wit' that takes the stories from pathos into tragedy. Chekhov knew what he was doing in his fiction and his drama. 'I finish every act as I do my stories; I keep the action calm and quiet till the end, then I punch the audience in the face.'
Chekhov's anger came from the violent treatment meted out by his father, which he couldn't forgive, as well as the social injustice he witnessed in a Russia building up to civil war. Anger, Hass observes, can be 'the wellspring of art'. It reminds me of Katherine Mansfield, who said that one of the 'kick offs' for her was a 'cry against corruption'. Anger motivated many of her stories, and Chekhov was one of her big influences. She too, wrote only short stories, never a novel.
There are other wonderful essays in this book - 'Howl at Fifty' takes another look at Ginsberg 50 years on and compares the style of it to passages from the Waste Land (I'd never made the connection with Eliot before, but it's so obvious I now feel stupid!). He describes Howl as 'a kind of exploded, hallucinatory autobiography'. He talks about the genesis of Moloch and observes that 'Moloch has still got hold of a good chunk of the American soul'.
I also loved 'Imagining the Earth' - his essays on eco-poetry and literature, and one on 'Teaching Poetry' which I can't even begin to precis. It touches on the oral nature of poetry on the page - poetry is 'a kind of speech that's meant to be said by others'. In other essays he explores the connections between poetry and the natural world. He is pessimistic about our generation's custodianship of the planet. 'What a depleted world our students are inheriting'. Will they be able to save it? 'The task may be beyond us.' But 'We have to act as if we can accomplish it, as if we can preserve that richness and diversity. We have to act as if the soul gets to choose.'
I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves literature - it's a great companion volume to Robert Hass's collected poems too. Thoughtful, profound, outspoken - the writings of a compassionate individual who is also a great poet.
September 13, 2013
I can't recommend this highly enough. As much as what Hass writes about how he writes is fascinating. His essay on Howl is written in the voice of a beat poet. His insights & observations are acute, refreshing. Read this book! Re-read it! Write in the margins, underline. Carry it around, read it in a cafe and keep it on the table as you begin writing a poem while watching the afternoon light turn to an amber glow.
November 12, 2012
An excellent book of essays covering everything from poetry, to photography, to the Cormac McCarthy Borders trilogy, to the protest of the cutting down of oak trees at the University of Berkeley campus. Throughout, the voice of Robert Hass, measured, self-reflective, intelligent. If this book had 20 more articles I could have kept on without a thought.
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November 26, 2022Have been flipping through this collection for the past couple of months and will definitely be returning to it in the future. Hass’s writing carries a contagious love of language. I specifically enjoyed the essays on Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and teaching poetry.
October 28, 2016
Remarkably astute essayist who varies is essays to suit their subjects. This collection draws me to want to read more of his work.
May 9, 2017
There are so many undercurrents and connections beyond what is just on the surface in these essays, which make for rigorous and delightful reading.
September 23, 2023
A grab bag of very interesting and insightful essays. Admittedly I skimmed some that didn’t capture my interest (the one on the War in Iraq and Kant, the one on John’s epistles) whereas others grabbed my most focused attention (his essays on Global literature inspired some wonderful reading earlier this year, and I was most surprised by the CIA poem). The writing on photography was fantastic.
The best part of this book for me was just the avenues that it opened up for more extended reading. The biopics of writers are always excellent, although I sometimes grew bored with his analyses of canon writers. One thing that is clear is Hass’ personal canon of writers that emerges - clear he has taste.
The best part of this book for me was just the avenues that it opened up for more extended reading. The biopics of writers are always excellent, although I sometimes grew bored with his analyses of canon writers. One thing that is clear is Hass’ personal canon of writers that emerges - clear he has taste.
January 27, 2018
Brilliant.
Poet, philosopher, acute observer of the unseen, Hass is the type of writer I long to find in my reading. What a gift.
These essays are brilliant. Literature, photography, poetry, the natural world come alive in a totally refreshing and nuanced articulation. My reading list doubled as I read about authors and playwrights that I now considered in a wholly different light.
What the light can do, indeed!
Poet, philosopher, acute observer of the unseen, Hass is the type of writer I long to find in my reading. What a gift.
These essays are brilliant. Literature, photography, poetry, the natural world come alive in a totally refreshing and nuanced articulation. My reading list doubled as I read about authors and playwrights that I now considered in a wholly different light.
What the light can do, indeed!
October 4, 2019
Very nice collection of essays that is fairly diverse, there's not a lot holding them together except that Hass wrote them. Some of them seem like they belong under the title, others don't. But books of essays are great because you can just read around in them and find the things you want. I would suggest reading this if you would like some insightful essays on literature, writers, and painting. Ther are some very nice essays in there on these topics.
October 15, 2023
Book took me a long while—I got some good recommendations from it, was touched by some nature / photography writing, and found some interesting poetry. I’m glad I read it. He’s a fantastic writer, truly.
January 26, 2020
Excellent...
May 18, 2022
"The deepest response to a work of art is, in fact, another work of art." -Robert Hass
July 2, 2022
This wasn't what I thought it would be, and I didn't finish it. Fortunately, it was a library book.
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March 26, 2023Actually, this is a book of essays and I am still reading it occasionally. 3/26/2023
August 10, 2024
A delight! My favorite essay was "notes of poetry and spirituality" which is sort of about poetry as a vehicle for spirituality without requiring religion or even belief.
December 19, 2024
Read and re-read and such a delight to keep revisiting it. Such range and depth.
December 26, 2025
This was "Okay" in Goodreads' terms, and so gets two stars. It was very well written, and Haas is very erudite. But it bumps up against the problem I often find with collections of essays - that I'm not interested in all the essays. I like to read essays now and then -- they are a different genre to the genres I normally read, and I rather like the idea of writing some essays myself, so I need models. Nonetheless, in a fat book like this, there are bound to be topics of little interest, and longueurs within essays where I'm wonderings why I'm reading them. What's more, the topics all very American -- which is to be expected with an American author -- so I lacked some points of connection and reference. Still, I kept going until the end, and I didn't skip any essays, so the writing was certainly good enough to keep me interested, even if sometimes the subjects would cause me to glaze over a little.
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November 14, 2015"They were trying to invent in language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to sing, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others, to make new and surprising kinds of verbal artifacts."
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I was having a really good time with this when the library reclaimed it. Will come back to it at some point.
Side-note: This book is a writer I don't know writing about other writers I don't know; it ought to be impossible. But a) Hass is very good, obviously, and b) How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read has basically given me superpowers. <3
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I was having a really good time with this when the library reclaimed it. Will come back to it at some point.
Side-note: This book is a writer I don't know writing about other writers I don't know; it ought to be impossible. But a) Hass is very good, obviously, and b) How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read has basically given me superpowers. <3
February 2, 2015
I finished reading what light can do: Essays on Art, Imagination, And the Natural World by Robert Hass on Sunday afternoon at the cottage in Three Rivers, Michigan (after a walk in a snowstorm around the lake). This is a wonderful collection of essays on a wide variety of interesting topics. Because Hass is a poet, there is a lot of stuff on poetry here. But the work is mainly about his encounter with the world, both inner and outer. The writing is beautiful and reveals a hidden world. I had a visit with the author in November and I wish I had read this whole book by that time. It would have added to a delightful conversation. It was a long read, but well worth it.
Read
May 15, 2013"The nouns in the subtitle of Robert Hass’s new book are abstract enough to cover the wide variety of its topics, but they barely suggest the range of allusion, the depth of some of the readings, the consistent eloquence and easy confidence of the style, and the author’s ability to blend personal and critical viewpoints." - Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma
This book was reviewed in the May 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our site: http://bit.ly/18JxneR
This book was reviewed in the May 2013 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our site: http://bit.ly/18JxneR
July 23, 2016
I really enjoyed this book for a while - but it's taken me a long time to get through it, and I'll admit I did skip a few essays in the last half of it. Not really my thing, but good for me and he's an excellent writer about things that I know only a little about....which makes it a tough slog at times, even though I want to want to read it...you know? Ah well....it made me feel good when a complete stranger on the bus saw it and asked me about it and she wrote down the title so that she could find a copy for herself.
July 21, 2013
I've never read any of Hass's prose before, but I picked up this book at the library because of his brilliant poetry. The pros is equally insightful, lyrical and worldly. It was difficult for me to finish, which is not surprising given that the writings in this collection were not originally intended for reading all at once, but there's a topical cohesiveness in the order of the pieces that I appreciated.
December 18, 2013
This was obviously meant for someone passionate about poetry and artistic/literary criticism, neither of which is me. The author is obviously brilliant, but since I don't share his passion for poetic criticism, it kind of left me in the dust.
The three stars are not for the quality of the book, but more a reflection of whether the book was a good fit for me, which it really wasn't. Like wearing a size 7 shoe, but putting on a 10. :)
The three stars are not for the quality of the book, but more a reflection of whether the book was a good fit for me, which it really wasn't. Like wearing a size 7 shoe, but putting on a 10. :)
June 12, 2016
I slowly induldged in this great book of essays and ideas. I am a huge fan of this poets work. So a tad leary of his essays at first. But as I finished it the other night I realized I could read whatever this man wrote. A bit of an academic, but one doesn't choke on an overbearing vocabulary. This book was interesting through and through. Even on some of the criticism of authors I'm not well fond of, great job.
November 26, 2013
A collection of talks and essays of uneven finish, some of whose provenance is frustratingly unidentified. At his best Hass writes with a sharp clarity, a humble profundity and a broad curiosity – often in the same sentence. As well as being usefully introduced to unfamiliar vistas, I found myself surprisingly often (and often surprisingly) moved to reflection.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews